Chapter 21
Brazil
Chapter Outline
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Presidential Transition
Thinking about Brazil
The Evolution of the Brazilian State
Political Culture
Political Participation
The State
Public Policy
The Media
Conclusion: After Lula?
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Brazil is the country of the future, and it always will be.
Stefan Zweig
The Basics
Brazil
Size
8.9 million km2, Fifth largest country in the world, slightly smaller than the United
States
Population
203.4 million
GNP per
capita
$10,208
Growth in
GNP
7.5% (2010)
Currency
1 US$ = 1.77 real (2011)
Ethnic groups White 54 (%), Mixed 39, Black 6, Other 1 (note that other ways of measuring has
the white population much smaller)
Religion
Roman Catholic 74 (%), Protestant 15, Other 4, None 7
Capital city
Brasilia
Head of State Dilma Rousseff (2011-)
PRESIDENTIAL TRADITION
As we have seen numerous times throughout Comparative Politics, political scientists think that
the transfer of power from one party or coalition to its opposition is an important watershed in
building an enduring and stable democracy. In the chapters on Russia, Nigeria, and Mexico, we
examined cases in which no such transition occurred or took place with difficulty at best. Under
those circumstances, it was hard to consider the given country democratic.
We will see such a transition in a more positive light with Brazil in two main ways. The
first is as close to definitive as we political scientists get. The second is more tentative, but the
evidence for it is at least close to being overwhelming.
First, Brazil ended its most recent period of authoritarian rule in 1985, when the military
gave way to a civilian government. After a few false starts, Fernando Henrique Cardoso
(1931–) was elected president a decade later. Cardoso was a reformer who had been on the left as
a young man. However, his was a center-right administration. Eight years later, he was
constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, and the election to replace him was won by the
leftist Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva (1945–). Lula (as he is known) had built his career in the trade
unions and was often seen as a rabble-rouser. Although he was calmer and more moderate that
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many expected, there was no question that power had shifted from right to left. Then, in 2010,
when Lula, too, faced term limits, his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff (1947-), was
handily elected to replace him. Although she, too, had impeccable left-wing credentials, the
smoothness of the campaign and transition made it clear that democracy was now as secure in
Brazil as it is in any of the other countries covered in Part 4.
The shift from FHC (as Cardoso is commonly known) to Lula marked as sharp and as
peaceful a transition from one political side to another after an election as anywhere in the
Global South. Despite many fears in Washington and beyond, the shift from one to the other
went just about as seamlessly as one would expect in the United States or any of the other
countries considered in Part 2. It succeeded in part because FHC and Lula, who were allies under
the military dictatorship but afterward became adversaries, somehow managed to work through
their differences. As Lula put it when Cardoso handed him the presidential sash and left the
palace he had lived in for eight years, ―you leave as a friend.‖
Second, although its political roots are less clear, just as impressive is Brazil’s recent and
remarkable economic growth. The Brazilian boom puts the quote that begins this chapter to rest.
It was included by the Austrian philosopher and novelist Stefan Zweig in the title of a book he
wrote on Brazil that was published in 1941.
He knew then that Brazil had always had remarkable potential for political and economic
success. Until recently, it was never able to reach it.
In the last few years, however, Brazil has become a ―member‖ of a new ―club‖ of
formerly less developed countries that are joining the ranks of the world’s political and economic
elite. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are among the largest in the
world.1 More important, with the possible exception of Russia, they are growing so fast that one
could almost say that the economic crisis that began in 2008 has barely touched them.
Brazil had a growth rate of 7.5 per cent in 2010. Although that rate was cut roughly in
half in 2011, it is still a figure most leaders of the advanced industrialized democracies would
covet. Overall, it is the eighth richest country in the world in aggregate, though by no means per
capita, terms.
The country has a large and growing middle class. According to one account, one-sixth of
the population has joined the middle class since 2003. Another 20 percent have escaped poverty.
But Brazil also has some of the neediest people in the Western hemisphere. In fact, the favelas
(slums) of Rio de Janeiro sit next to its wealthiest neighborhoods that stretch along the world
famous Ipanema beach.
It would be absurd to claim that Brazil’s new-found political stability was the only cause
of the economic turnaround. We will explore how and why this turnaround occurred and why
Zweig seems to be wrong—at long last—in the public policy section.
1
The term was coined by Jim O’Neill, who headed an investment team Goldman-Sachs, which is a significant
player in the equity and financial planning markets in Brazil. On the topic of BRICS, see his The Growth Map.
(New York: Penguin, 2011).
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For now, to see how far Brazil has come, it is enough to note that the country was named
the host of both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 summer Olympic Games. The 2016 games
will be the first ones held in South America.
Brazil has not totally escaped the current recession. The economy was stagnant for most
of 2009, but that was better than most of the rest of the world. It was only in recession for two
months, was hit by the downturn later than most countries, and emerged from it before the end of
the third quarter of 2009.
Or as one leading Brazilian economist put it to National Public Radio on November 30,
2009, referring to the joke that starts the chapter, ―the future is now.‖
What’s In a Name?
Brazil is not the only country that owes its name to a commodity. Argentina is derived from the
Spanish word for silver and the Côte d’Ivoire from the French for Ivory.
The word Brazil itself was coined by Portuguese colonialists who so prized the brasil tree
for its strong red dye. Italians who also coveted the region at the time referred to it as the ―land
of parrots.‖
THINKING ABOUT BRAZIL
The People
Like India, Brazil is a vast land of vast contrasts.
To begin with it is huge. Only the United States, Canada, Russia, and China are
physically larger. Brazil is so big that all of the member states of the European Union would
easily fit inside it. It also borders every country in South America other than Ecuador and Chile.
Contrasts should be expected in a country this big. Most of us begin and end our mental
image with the beaches of Rio on those rare occasions when we think about Brazil. Indeed, it has
plenty of them and not just in Rio.
Its cities now have glittery skyscrapers. Its capital city, Brasilia, was built in the 1950s
and is considered an architectural gem. But there are other Brazils. Some of the land in the
Northeast is arid. Much of land near the Amazon River is a jungle, including the rain forests
whose destruction has become so environmentally controversial in recent years.
Brazil is also one of the most racially diverse countries in the world. The most important
groups are descendants of native Brazilians (often still mistakenly called Indians), Portuguese
colonizers, African slaves, and later, mostly European immigrants. Even more important for our
purposes is the fact that it is sometimes impossible to tell which group a person belongs to (also
see Chapter 16 on Mexico). As in the United States, most Indians died of diseases for which they
had not developed immune systems. Others had sexual relations with the overwhelmingly male
Portuguese farmers. Sexual relations between whites and blacks two centuries later were also
common. In short, Brazil probably has more mixed race citizens than any country in the world.
At the same time, skin color matters. Blacks make up the bulk of the poor population. Whites
dominate the elite. In fact, given the centuries of interracial sexual relations, very few people are
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―purely‖ anything. Therefore, many commentators use such terms as people who ―look‖ white,
―seem‖ black, and so on.
This does not mean that Brazil is a racial paradise that has overcome its historical
divisions. More than half of the population claims to have some African origins. These ―Afrodescendants,‖ as they are officially known, live shorter lives, have less education, make less
money, and are more likely to be subjected to police harassment than their white countrymen and
women.
Beyond these visible differences lies an equally important part of the story—more racial
harmony than one finds almost anywhere else in the western hemisphere. To cite but one
example, according to the 2000 census, almost a third of all Brazilians were part of what would
be considered interracial marriages in the United States. Even Rio’s famous annual Carnival
seamlessly combines African and European themes.
This relative harmony should not obscure the fact that there are some lingering racial
tensions that have the same main root cause as their equivalents in the United States—slavery.
Two factors, however, mitigate the continued impact of slavery. First, racial divisions were never
enshrined in laws such as those of the United States or South Africa that defined what was
―required‖ to be considered black. Second, the racial balance is closer to even, since, as noted
above, at least half of the Brazilian population has some African origins.
There is also a relatively new indicator of diversity in Brazil: religion. Until the last thirty
years or so, Brazil was almost completely Roman Catholic, although many people were Catholic
in name only. But as in most of Latin America and as in Africa, Protestant churches have
experienced tremendous growth, mostly among the urban poor. Most of the new Protestants are
members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) or have joined evangelical and
Pentecostal denominations. The best estimate is that about 15 percent of Brazilians now belong
to one of them, which is typical for South America as a whole. Disagreements between them and
mainline Catholics have yet to become a serious political issue, but they might at some point in
the future.
Finally, Brazil is a land of economic contrasts. Upper middle class Brazilians (mostly
white) live very comfortable lives. They have everything from cars to air conditioning. They
have enough money to travel around the world on business and pleasure. Yet, according to one
2009 study, nearly 40 million people live on the equivalent of $65 a month or less. Three years
earlier, 19 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty, which meant that they could not
meet their basic food, housing, health, and other needs. On the positive side of the ledger, that
was down from 35 percent in 1993. The improvement is largely due to the growth in the overall
economy and a series of government programs, both of which will be discussed later in the
chapter.
The very ―face‖ Brazil presents to the world is changing as well. For centuries, it was
primarily agricultural, known for its sugar, coffee, and cows. Agricultural products are still
among its leading exports. For example, China would have a hard time sustaining its food supply
without its massive imports of Brazilian soy beans. Today, it is an industrial and financial
powerhouse, something we will all see when the World Cup and Olympics fill the world’s
television screens.
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The Basics II: Resources
Brazil is blessed with more than abundant natural resources. No country has more fresh water or
tropical forests. It rivals the rest of the world in its mineral and oil deposits, the latter bolstered
by the recent discovery of the world’s largest oil fields about two hundred miles off its coast.
Some of its land is so fertile and its temperature so warm that farmers can reap three harvests a
year.
As we will see in far more detail toward the end of the chapter, Brazil’s use of those
resources has been phenomenal in recent years. It exports more soy beans to China than any
other country. Embraer is the world’s third largest producer of passenger jet airplanes. And to
add even more wealth to its already booming coffers, the new offshore Sub-Salt oil field will
make the country one of the world’s four or five leading producers sometime in the next decade.
Not even thirty years ago, Zweig may well have still been correct. At the time, many
intellectuals were convinced that a commodity-based economy would permanently leave Brazil
on the periphery of the global system. The boom in demand for its products in the last decade
and a half has fueled an all but total economic transformation. If it can keep its growth rate up
near its 2010 level, the overall economy will double in size in less than a decade. Its total
economic production is currently ranked seventh in the world. At its current growth rate, it could
easily become fourth within two or three decades, trailing only the United States, China, and
Japan.
The New Brazil
Brazil is not normally a country that lends itself to one-liners. However, there are two important
and misleading ones. In addition to the one by Zweig, President of Charles de Gaulle declared
that ―Brazil is not a serious‖ country in the early 1960s. De Gaulle may have been right then, but
like Zweig, anyone making such a statement today would be far off the mark.
However you choose to measure such things, Brazil has done extremely well, and these
changes seem likely to last. Once a country deeply in debt, Brazilians take pride in living in a
country that now makes, not takes, loans. Inflation totaled more than a quadrillion per cent
during the first century and a half of Brazilian independence. Today, it has been tamed. Brazil’s
currency is now stable, which is all the more remarkable since it used eight different monetary
systems from 1940 to 1995.
In 2011, Brazil is a power in the three major arenas economists focus on. It is one of the
world’s leading exporters of minerals and food, most notably now to resource-poor China. It is a
world leader in manufacturing everything from airplanes to automobiles. And although it has
lagged some in this arena, is it now in the forefront in developing some of the high technology
industries that will be central to our globalizing future. It has done more to reduce its dependence
on petroleum than any other country, even before the discovery of the massive reserves in its
coastal waters. What’s more, its financial institutions are becoming a major source of investment
capital as befits a country that was one of the last to enter and one of the first to emerge from the
global recession that began in 2008.
Brazil’s success story is easiest to see in the rapid improvement in its standard of living.
This is especially important to Brazilians because it has permitted an historically unprecedented
reduction in what was once an extremely high poverty rate as summarized in Table 21.1.
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Table 21.1
Improvement in Selected Economic Indicators
Indicator
1993-1995 Average
2009
Per Cent Poor
31.8
15.3
Average Monthly Income (in reals)
457
630
Average Years of Education
5.4
7.6
Per Cent of Households With a Washing Machine
24.3
44.4
Source: Adapted from ―Lula’s Legacy.‖ The Economist. 2 October 2010. 30.
Fútbol
One of the things that unites Brazilians is their fanatical love for the national soccer team. Brazil
has won five World Cups and is always among the favorites to win.
Some of the world’s best players have led Brazil, including Pele, who may have been the
best ever. When Brazilians are at their best, they employ an almost ballet-like strategy that some
have called the ―exquisite game.‖ Also, like, Pele, players are known only by a single nickname.
Sometimes when one great player’s career is ending, his presumed successor gets a version of
that nickname—hence Ronaldinho replacing Ronaldo as a top scorer (he never quite lived up to
the name).
There are also problems with soccer. As in most of the world (the United States is an
exception), football is a working-class sport. In Brazil, that also means that almost all players are
either black or of mixed race. Also Brazil’s domestic soccer leagues have become a financial
disaster. Although they are known as clubs rather than franchises, most of their owners have run
them into the ground. They have also been vehicles through which the corruption we will discuss
operates. All serious Brazilian players are based in Europe where they can make millions of
dollars a year.
Lula is a lifelong fan of Corintians of São Paolo.
For more, see Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An (Unlikely) Theory of
Globalization. (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), ch. 5. Also note that we finished this chapter
on the day legendary soccer star Socrates died. He was a rare Brazilian professional athlete in
that he was both a doctor and politically active
Key Questions
As usual, we will ask all the core questions about comparative politics here that we have covered
in the preceding twenty chapters. Also, as was the case in the rest of the book, there are questions
that are unique to Brazil, most notably:
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Why has democracy been so hard to establish and maintain in Brazil, even though it has
not had as many destructive revolutions as we have seen elsewhere?
Why did the military play such a prominent role in Brazilian politics until the late 1980s?
How has Brazil managed to integrate its incredibly diverse population? Its track record is
by no means perfect, but very few countries have fared any better.
Have the presidencies of FHC, Lula, and Dilma solidified Brazilian democracy at long
last?
Is Brazil about to emerge as one of the world’s leading economic powers?
THE EVOLUTION OF THE BRAZILIAN STATE
In many ways, we are drawn to Brazil because of the dramatic political and economic changes
since the end of military rule in 1986. However, we cannot understand them without first
spending an unusual amount of time exploring Brazilian history because as the list of key
questions suggests, that history has been unusual in a number of key respects, few of which it
shares with other South American countries, let alone with the rest of the world (www.vbrazil.com/information/history).
Before the Portuguese Arrived
Like all colonized countries, Brazil had an important history before the Portuguese arrived in
1500. Unfortunately, because none of the indigenous Brazilians left a written record, it is hard to
be precise about who those people were and what they were like.
It is all but certain that they were part of the vast migration from Siberia across the
Bering Straits to what is now Alaska. Over ten thousand years, those people(s) settled the
Americas and developed very different cultural, economic, and linguistic patterns in today’s
Brazil.
Some were quite advanced and had elaborate trading networks which stretched as far as
what is now Florida. Others were far more primitive and nomadic. Some may even have
practiced cannibalism. Some got along with each other. Some fought periodic wars using blow
pipes filled with darts laden with the fatal poison curare.
The people the Portuguese first encountered along the coast were among the most
advanced. They lived in thatched huts, grew a number of crops, and fished in both the nearby
rivers and the ocean (See Table 21.2).
As was also the case in much of the Americas, the indigenous ―Brazilians‖ did not know
what to make of these light-skinned men who arrived on peculiar looking sailing ships and
brandished equally peculiar looking weapons. It was not the weapons that wiped out most of the
7 million or so people who encountered the Portuguese. Instead, it was the diseases they brought
with them.
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Table 21.2
Brazil before Independence
Date
Event
1494
Treaty of Torsedillas
1500
Arrival of Portuguese
ca. 1520
First major wave of colonists arrive
1630–1657
Dutch occupy much of Brazil
1807
Court moves from Lisbon to Brazil
1818
Court returns
1822
Independence declared with Pedro I as emperor
Colonial Rule
The fifteenth century was a busy one on the Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal became
separate countries, albeit with intermarried ruling families. They had finally managed to throw
out the Moors (Arabs) from North Africa who had ruled the peninsula for centuries. Finally, both
countries adopted the vicious Inquisition that persecuted, tortured, and killed anyone suspected
of not being devout and loyal enough to the Catholic Church.
Beginning early in the century, the two kingdoms began to explore and take over lands to
the south of them in Africa. Their main goal was to find a sea route to India and the rest of East
Asia to gain access to its spices and, it was presumed, vast sources of wealth. Needless to say,
the two became rivals.
They were also both convinced that there were lands to their west that they would vie for.
The rivalry came to a head shortly after Christopher Columbus returned from his first voyage to
the ―new world‖ that he mistakenly thought was part of the Indies. In 1494, the Pope helped
Spain and Portugal negotiate the Treaty of Torsedillas, which divided the world west of Europe
between the two countries. The Portuguese were to get all land 450 leagues (roughly 1,700
miles) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain got the rest. Obviously, no one knew what
lay in those mostly unexplored seas. As it turned out, the Portuguese did not respect the dividing
line when they expanded their new colony of Brazil. Nonetheless, the treaty officially remained
in effect for almost three hundred years.
Accounts of how Brazilian ships under the command of Pedro Cabral got to what is now
Brazil in 1500 vary. Some claim that his fleet was blown westward in an attempt to find a better
route to the Indies around Africa and thus ―found‖ Brazil by accident. Others claim he was
seeking a large island dubbed the Land of the True Cross that supposedly lay many miles to
Portugal’s west. The real explanation does not matter. Cabral did arrive. To validate Portugal’s
claim to the land, he sent one of this ships back to Lisbon with a tree the Portuguese called ―paubrasil‖ because it produced a red dye and from which the colony soon got its name.
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It would be another twenty years before the Portuguese decided to send colonists to this
still little understood land. Until then, they sent missions to explore the coast, established the
brazil wood trade, and brought a handful of natives back to the court in Lisbon which viewed
them as curiosities.
Once the colonists arrived in earnest after 1520, things changed dramatically. Five of
these transformations stand out.
First and by no means least significant were the diseases the Portuguese brought with
them that the native peoples could not fight off. Millions died, wiping out the ―Indians‖ in all but
the remotest parts of the country.
Second, as was the case in most European colonies, few women came with the first few
waves of settlers. That meant that Portuguese men had sexual relations with native women. The
historical evidence is sketchy, but all the signs are that those relationships were unusually
promiscuous. By the end of the century, it was hard to tell who was white, who was indigenous,
and who was a mulatto, a term that is now largely out of favor among English-speaking
academics.
Third, even more than the British and French in North America, the Portuguese and
Spanish ran their colonies for the exclusive benefit of the Crown back home, and, they did so
with far more brutality and far less skill.
Fourth, the Portuguese introduced slavery almost from the moment they arrived. At first,
they mostly enslaved Indians. After 1550, however, they began forcing Africans to make the
perilous and often fatal voyage across the Atlantic to the point that today Brazil has the largest
―African‖ population of any country in the world other than Nigeria.
Fifth, the Treaty of Torsedillas also gave the Jesuits the exclusive right to represent the
Church in what soon became known as Brazil. Today, we tend to think of the Jesuits as one of
the most scholarly and tolerant orders in the Catholic Church. In those days, however, it was a
bastion of the Inquisition. Jesuits saw it as their mission to convert as many ―pagans‖ as possible,
which they did with ruthless brutality.
The Brazilian colony also got caught up in the conflicts wracking Europe at the time.
When the Spanish and Portuguese crowns temporarily united in the late sixteenth century, the
Dutch decided that they should try to take over their rivals’ Brazil. By the middle of the
seventeenth century, the Dutch had been driven out, but only as a result of the creation of a
strong Brazilian militia, which began the tradition of military involvement in politics. At the
time, Brazil was officially ruled by Queen Maria (who had been certified as insane), although
real power rested with her son Dom2 Joao.
About eleven thousand members of the Portuguese royal family and courtiers set sail in
November 1807—along with all of the Portuguese official documents and half of the treasury. In
their six-week voyage to Brazil, the people on the ships suffered tremendously and arrived at
Salvador in less than ideal shape. As one historian put it:
2
Dom was an honorific used in the titles of noblemen. It is essentially equivalent to the English sir. Sometimes
references to kings include Dom, sometimes not.
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For the residents of Salvador, the sight must have been bizarre indeed: a mad queen, an
obese regent, and thousands of disheveled courtiers aghast at the new world before
them.3
The Portuguese were shocked at how primitive their colony was. They were also surprised by the
fact that almost everyone in the region was either black or mulatto, which they had a hard time
reconciling with the conventional European thoughts about race at the time.
There was an important reason why the court fled to Brazil and made Queen Maria the
only European monarch to ever set foot on American soil before the end of the nineteenth
century. Unlike most European monarchies, the Portuguese and the British cast their lot against
Napoleon Bonaparte. The court left Lisbon literally a day before the French and Spanish troops
arrived. The British ended up supporting the Portuguese regime in exile, which allowed it to
establish a toe-hold in Brazil and to monopolize its foreign trade.
As confusing as this history might seem -- and as irrelevant as the details may be for the
rest of the chapter -- it was vital for Brazil’s future in an unusual way. Throughout the colonial
period, the history of the Americas as a whole was deeply influenced by events in far away
Europe. But in Brazil, it obviously took a particularly bizarre twist. Brazil became the capital of
the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves. Eerily, European monarchs became
the rulers of post-independence Brazil.
It was not to last much more than half a century.
Conflict
In Brazil
For a country marked by such instability, Brazil has had surprisingly little violent conflict. There
were relatively small revolts that brought down the empire, a few military coups, and a brief but
violent guerilla resistance against the military regime that came to power in the 1960s. Generally
speaking, however, Brazilians have handled conflicts over race, class, the role of the military,
and more without taking up arms as often as many of its neighbors.
A Brazilian Empire?
Colonization by both Iberian powers had a common flaw. Everything they did was designed to
enrich the two monarchies back home. As exploitative as the British and French were in North
America, they at least encouraged a modicum of economic development and self-government.
Not Portugal or Spain. While Europe was being torn apart by the Napoleonic wars in the
early nineteenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese hold on Central and South America frayed.
3
Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 42–
43.
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Between 1810 and 1823, the Spanish colonies broke free from Madrid. Some of the revolts were
long and violent, especially those led by Simon Bolivar. Some ushered in a century or more of
protracted conflict, as in Mexico (see Chapter 16).
Independence came differently in Brazil, largely because the Portuguese empire was
based there. After Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, the King and much of the court returned
to Lisbon in 1818. They did, however, leave behind one of his heirs, Dom Pedro, to head a
colony that was far more powerful and wealthier than the ―mother‖ country in Europe.
Brazil could not escape events swirling around its borders. An uprising in Lisbon in 1818
touched off demands for independence. However, unlike the situation in the Spanish colonies,
the Brazilian elite turned to one of their own. The King’s son, Dom Pedro, seized control of the
independence movement and, to make a long story short, declared the creation of the Brazilian
Empire and named himself Emperor Pedro I in 1822. Thus, Brazil remained a monarchy in a
hemisphere where almost every other country was at least nominally a republic. His was a
regime that lasted more than sixty years and began almost a century in which politics was largely
an elite affair (See Table 21.3).
Table 21.3
From Empire through Military Dictatorship
Date
Event
1822
Independence
1831
Pedro II assumes throne
1888
End of legal slavery
1889
End of empire
1930
Vargas takes power
1937
Creation of Estado Novo
1954
Vargas commits suicide
1955
Election of Kubitschek
1964
Military seizes power
1985
End of military rule
Very few of the 3 million Brazilians knew who governed their country either before or
after independence. Whether slaves or free people, most Brazilians were illiterate, and little the
government did directly touched their lives.
Nonetheless, the imperial period was not an easy one. Pedro I coveted the throne in
Lisbon, which alienated many Brazilians. He launched a war against Argentina that also cost him
popular support. Finally, in 1831, he abdicated in favor of his then five-year old son, Pedro II.
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Once the new king reached fifteen, he was allowed to govern a county that remained stable until
nearly the end of the century (See Table 21.2).
During the imperial period, Brazil’s economy relied on slavery. Throughout the
nineteenth century, something approaching half of its population were either slaves or their
descendants. Brazil circumvented international agreements to end the slave trade between 1817
and 1850 and was the very last country to officially end the practice in 1888.
Once it stopped importing slaves, Brazil began courting white immigrants, including
defeated confederate soldiers from the United States. From the middle of the nineteenth century
onward, Brazil attracted immigrants from most of Europe—and in the twentieth century from
Japan as well.
Slave and ―free‖ immigrant labor produced a boom in the Brazilian economy during the
second half of the nineteenth century. Unlike what was happening in North America or Europe,
the growth was not primarily industrial but was concentrated on what economists call the
primary sector--agriculture and mining. Still, by the time the Empire fell, Brazil had one of the
three leading economies in South America, along with Chile and Argentina.
Meanwhile, the empire literally ran out of steam. After fifty-eight years on the throne,
Pedro II had made no plans for his own succession. He and most of the rest of the elite rejected
his only heir, Isabel, on the assumption that no woman should rule. Therefore, the military seized
power in 1889 from a regime that was collapsing of its own accord, though it should be pointed
out that the coup’s leaders had little support from outside their own ranks. As a harbinger of
things to come, one of the officers who overthrew the emperor was FHC’s grandfather.
By that time that there were two Brazils: rich and poor. The differences between them
roughly coincided with the racial divide between the Portuguese-based elite and the mostly black
former slaves. At the time, these divisions were not politically important. The white elite ran
politics. Most of the blacks and mulattos lived in rural areas where they were largely invisible to
the wealthy civilian and military families who ran the country. That began to change only as
Brazil industrialized and urbanized during the twentieth century. Until then, families that could
not afford university education for their children, sent them to the military, which became one
the main path for upward social mobility—and political instability—for a century to come.
The Republic
Between 1888 and 1891, the new leaders wrote a constitution that drew on a federal tradition
dating back to the initial Portuguese colonization. In 1894, the military handed power over to a
group of civilians, most of whom were wealthy landowners in the São Paolo region.
Both the military and civilian elites had been deeply influenced by the theory of
positivism that was developed by the French sociologist Auguste Comte. They so firmly
believed that a hierarchical social system would enable Brazil to develop economically that they
included ―order and progress‖ as the motto on their new flag, where it remains to this day.
It was also a republic in name only. The right to vote was severely restricted because of
steep property ownership and income requirements. Illiterates and enlisted men in the military
were barred from voting well into the second half of the twentieth century. Formally, the
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republic was highly decentralized; however, the national government held most of the power
most of the time.
The period through World War I saw substantial economic and industrial growth
especially in and around São Paolo which remains the economic hub of the country to this day.
The war made Brazil an attractive place for manufacturers to locate their factories precisely
because it was so far from the fighting that ravaged Europe, and as such Brazil was able to stay
out of the conflict until it declared war on Germany in 1917. Cities boomed. A working class,
including militant socialist and anarchist wings, developed, but strikes and other protests were
easily put down, further reinforcing the ―order‖ side of positivism.
The chaos following the election led to a revolt by the tenentes (lieutenants) or young
officers who wanted something more orderly and stable for their country. Cardoso’s father was
one of their mentors. The tenentes came from almost all points on the political spectrum and
remained a force to be reckoned with throughout the military dictatorship.
Despite their best efforts, bands of guerillas fanned out around much of the country by
the middle of the decade. They and less violent opponents of the regime chafed against state and
national governments that, for example, did little to expand educational opportunities or allow
many more people to vote. Problems were exacerbated with the Great Depression, which began
with the stock market collapse in New York in October 1929.
The situation came to a head in 1930 when Getúlio Vargas (1882–1954) seized power in
yet another military coup. Vargas had been active politically since World War I and was known
for his willingness to expand the suffrage. As a result, even though he had lost the 1930 election
decisively, his coup was greeted with widespread popular support. He remained in power until
1945. He regained the presidency in 1950 when he led a corrupt and ineffective government that
ended in his suicide four years later.
In his first fifteen years in office, Vargas faced daunting tasks, including helping Brazil
weather the Depression. To do so, he paid more attention to the economic situation in urban
areas. He doubled the size of the electorate, even granting some women the right to vote. In
reality, power passed to a far more centralized network of elites, most of whom came from the
military and were even more repressive than the rural power brokers of the republican years.
Vargas and his so-called Liberal Alliance faced protest almost from the beginning. The
vanquished former elite base rose in opposition. They raised millions of dollars to buy arms in
part by selling more than 80,000 wedding rings and other pieces of jewelry. Their revolt was put
down easily.
In 1934, Vargas and his colleagues drafted a new constitution that combined republican
and corporatist elements borrowed from fascist Italy. An appointed legislature named Vargas
president that year, and he promised elections at the end of his four-year term. In 1937, he
canceled the election and created the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship that lasted until the
end of World War II. It was an odd mix of populism, patriotism, nationalism, and
authoritarianism that emphasized the power of Vargas and his cronies. One primary school
textbook put its core values bluntly in the form a discussion between a father and son.
What is government, papa?
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[Government] is an organization that directs and orients the direction of the country,
attending to its needs and its progress. Everyone needs a guide, a governor, a director
who makes things run smoothly.4
Conditions deteriorated during War II. At the urging of the United States, Brazil entered the war
in 1941 although only a handful of its soldiers saw combat. Nonetheless, the chaos in Europe
shriveled Brazil’s export markets at a time when it was increasingly dependent on foreign trade.
In an attempt to fend off the opposition, Vargas promised new elections to be held after
the end of the war. Before they occurred, Vargas was deposed by the military. A new
constitution was written in 1946 once elections were finally held. In 1950, Vargas was reelected
with the support of the same left he had repressed for most of his first period in power. Vargas
abandoned his new-found leftist supporters and found himself increasingly isolated. He became a
virtual recluse in the presidential palace before he shot himself on August 24, 1954.
The next decade was dominated by the left, especially Juscelino Kubitschek (1902–
1976). His presidency (1955–1961) produced two profound changes. First, he introduced
Brazil’s first substantial social service and welfare programs. Second, he oversaw the
construction of a new capital city. Brasilia was intentionally located in the middle of the country
far from the rival coastal cities such as Rio and São Paolo. Although often viewed skeptically
when it was being built, Brasilia has been a rousing success, and its airport bears Kubitschek’s
name.
His lasting impact probably came in two other areas which were harder to see at the time.
To begin with, the 1960 election was the first in Brazilian history in which one elected official
peacefully handed over power to another (the constitution prohibited a sitting president to run for
reelection). He also began the country’s first serious effort to industrialize, which paved the way
for FHC’a and Lula’a reforms.
That did not mean that everything was calm. Brazil had its share of odd characters. One
French newspaper likened the short-term president Janio Quadros to Marx—Harpo not Karl. It
even had its own version of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy in Carlos Lacerda, himself a former
communist. Attacks by Lacerda led Quadros to resign after a mere seven months in office. He
was succeeded by his vice-president João Goulart, who moved the country even farther to the
left.
The military had never been happy with the left-wing policies civilian leaders pursued
after Vargas’ fall. After Quadros resigned, it took a few months of negotiations before the
military allowed Goulart to assume the presidency and then only if he agreed to new institutional
arrangements that stripped the president of most of his power.
Despite the concessions, the military overthrew Goulart on March 31, 1964, forcing him
and Kubitschek into exile. This was the fifth time the military had intervened since 1945. Every
time before, it had quickly withdrawn from day-to-day administration of the country.
4
Cited in Robert M. Levine, The History of Brazil. (London: Palgrave, 1999), 106.
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This time, the officers planned to stay at least until the situation was fully stabilized. In
one form or another, the military remained in power for a generation.
Military Dictatorship
Most countries in South America went through periods of military rule at some point during the
Cold War. In particular, following Cuba’s revolution and adoption of communism, leaders in
South America and in Washington, D.C., feared that Castro-like regimes would spread
throughout the hemisphere.
They had some reason to do so. Revolutions broke out in much of the region, including
one in Bolivia led by Fidel Castro’s colleague Ernesto (Che) Guevara. A Marxist government
headed by Salvador Allende twice won presidential elections in Chile. Put simply, the army took
over in country after country, making military dictatorship the rule rather than the exception,
often with the implicit or explicit support of the United States.
The military was less brutal in Brazil than in Chile or Argentina. The generals retained
some figments of democracy, including creating two political parties that were jokingly referred
to as the ―party of yes‖ and the ―party of yes, sir.‖
By the middle of the 1960s, the military regime had to confront a rebellion led by groups
of urban guerillas. In 1968, it suspended Congress. Within a year, the military had all but total
control of the formal institutions of government.
Not all dissent was suppressed. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of suspected
dissidents were tortured and imprisoned (like Rousseff), while thousands (like Cardoso) spent
years in exile. Others ―were disappeared‖—that odd choice of words used describe people in
Brazil, Argentina, and Chile who were arrested and never heard from again.
Middle class Brazilians accepted military rule in part because of the tradition of order and
progress and in part because economic growth after 1965 had made them wealthier than they
ever imagined. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor continued to widen.
By the late 1970s, opposition to military rule had come out in the open in ways the
government could not easily put down. In their different ways, Lula and Cardoso were key
figures—and allies—in the opposition. Both were accidental activists.
Despite his family’s long involvement in politics, Cardoso saw himself as a scholar who
objectively studied Brazilian society, especially the role of race, poverty, and multinational
companies. He was definitely on the left, but as an academic rather than as an activist. He spent
the first four years of military rule in exile in Chile and France, still working mostly as a
professor. He was allowed to return in 1968, but was soon dismissed from his position at the
University of São Paolo. As befits a world-renowned scholar, Cardoso organized fellow
intellectuals and other members of the elite.
Lula was drawn into union work by his leftist brother. In his organizing career, his
priority was always to improve the working and living conditions of his fellow employees. Lula
was able to continue to work as a labor organizer mostly because he stayed out of politics. Lula
shed his earlier apolitical image and decided to fight the military government in the interests of
union workers whose standard of living had been cut dramatically. It was at this time that he and
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his colleagues formed the Workers’ Party (PT) that would eventually propel him to the
presidency.
As the repression intensified, both men—and millions of others—realized that they had
no choice but to become politically engaged. By the end of the 1960s, dissidents had formed
small groups of notoriously incompetent urban guerillas (including President Rousseff), which
Cardoso has described as a proletarian revolution without the proletariat. After these groups were
put down as a result of torture and killings by the authorities, the likes of Cardoso and Lula
decided to wage a nonviolent campaign against the regime.
The opposition crystallized around a campaign, Direjta Ja (direct elections now). The
dissidents came close but ultimately did not reach their goal. However, it had become clear to
military leaders, including President Ernesto Geisel, that change was unavoidable. That did not
mean that change came easily.
Other militaries throughout the region saw their hold on power slip as Cold War tensions
began to ebb. Perhaps because they were weary of governing, Geisel’s government began to
negotiate with many of the more moderate dissidents about a transition to civilian rule. As a
result, in 1985, the generals handed power back to citizen politicians and a regime that fell far
short of democratic.
Pacting
One of the most exciting concepts in the study of democratization is pacting.
Many of the most successful transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule in Latin
America and Southern and Eastern Europe occurred when moderates of the outgoing regime and
their counterparts in the opposition agreed to work things out.
Geisel, Lula, and Cardoso proved to be great ―pacters,‖ aided perhaps by the fact that at
least Geisel and Cardoso were part of the traditional elite and Lula was not a firebrand.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Lula
The first decade of civilian rule was difficult. Two weak presidents were chosen by the voters—
one died before taking office, and the next elected president was impeached (See Table 21.4). In
short, they did little to help the country heal its wounds. A new constitution was written in 1988
(see the section on the state), but it alone was not enough.
It took the two terms Cardoso and Lula each served to give democratic government in
Brazil unprecedented stability. In fact, Cardoso and Lula were the first presidents since the 1930s
to hand over power peacefully to their successor.
Neither man planned to be a political leader. Cardoso came from a well-connected
family. As the Profile box shows, he had an illustrious career as a center-left student of economic
development, all the while surviving (often barely) the political winds flowing around him.
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Table 21.4
Presidents of Brazil since the End of Military Rule
Name
Assumed Office
Tancredo Neves
1985
José Sarney
1986
Fernando Collor
1990
Itamar Franco
1992
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
1995
Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva (Lula)
2003
Dilma Rousseff
2011
Along with Lula, he had been one of the leaders of the opposition to military rule.
Because of his connections on both sides, Cardoso became a key go-between when the military
decided to hand power over to civilians in the mid-1980s. By the early 1980s, FHC had become
a senator and was often accused of collaborating with the military by his erstwhile leftist
colleagues. In a sign of how his career was changing, he turned down a tenured position at the
University of California. He had just been offered a position in the Brazilian senate, while the
one in Washington was outside the question.
The fourth of the weak presidents, Itamar Franco, asked Cardoso to become foreign
minister. He was well suited for the job, having spent his years in exile in Argentina, Chile, the
United States, and France. However, shortly after Franco became president, the country went
through one of its periodic nosedives in which the currency collapsed and inflation skyrocketed.
The President asked Cardoso—who had no real economic experience—to become Minister of
Finance instead. Cardoso presided over the creation of Plan Real in 1994, which introduced
another new currency that stabilized the economy. Cardoso’s political reputation was set. He
easily defeated Lula and other contenders that year. He pushed through a constitutional
amendment allowing him to run for a second term four years later when he soundly defeated
Lula again.
At the end of his second term in office, Cardoso was finally denied the right to run for reelection. He was also in his early seventies and exercised unusual political maturity and realism
for a Brazilian leader and decided to retire, although he still exerts some influence in the centerright from behind the scenes.
Profile
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Cardoso describes himself as an ―accidental president‖ in his memoir. He was born in 1931 into
one of the country’s most influential families. His grandfather was a general and had been a
mentor for many of the tenentes. As was common in the generation of political/military leaders
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active after the turn of the twentieth century, Cardoso’s grandfather and father knew how to get
along with everybody, a characteristic we will see in the section on political culture.
The younger Cardoso attended the relatively new University of São Paolo where he
earned his doctorate and joined the faculty before he turned thirty. His academic career was
based on the assumption that professors do their best work when they do rigorous research and
report their findings as dispassionately as possible.
Cardoso started his research career as one of the first scholars to openly consider race in
Brazil. He later became one of the leaders of the academic left who studied the relationship
between Third World dependency on ―the north‖ and underdevelopment.
But Cardoso was never a doctrinaire leftist. When Chip sat in on a guest lecture he gave
at the University of Michigan, it was clear that he was not an ideologue and tried to be a bridge
builder between left and right, which was very uncommon in the mid-1970s. Because he was
never part of the doctrinaire left of the 1960s and 1970s, his work is often treated skeptically by
what remains of the Marxist intellectual elite who appropriately introduced the idea of
dependency into our intellectual lexicon.
Since leaving the presidency, Cardoso has joined the Club of Madrid, which is a group of
retired political leaders who work for peace. It is better known as the elders (www.theelders.org).
The 2002 presidential election was finally Lula’s time. Lula was even more of an
accidental president than Cardoso. He had run for the office three times before and lost by larger
margins each time.
More importantly for our purposes, no two politicians who were often allies could have
been more different. Lula was born in 1945 to an impoverished family in the northeast. His
father listed his birthday as October 5th when he officially registered his son. In fact, he was born
on October 27th. Soon thereafter, his father moved to São Paolo, leaving his family behind. When
Lula was about nine, his mother moved the family to the big city to join his father only to
discover that he had a new family that none of them knew about. Eventually, Lula would have at
last twenty-two full or half siblings.
To describe his family as poor gives them the benefit of the doubt. Lula worked from the
time he was nine, including stints as a shoe shiner and street peddler. Lula had little formal
education until he entered an apprenticeship program for machinists as a teenager.
Profile
Lula
Lula has ended his second term as president and followed FHC into retirement.
The political importance of his presidency lies in the fact that he succeeded the far more
conservative Cardoso, and the transition occurred with little or no controversy, something that
we have seen throughout Comparative Politics is an important indicator of a democracy taking
root.
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Lula never set out to be a politician. He had virtually no formal education other than his
apprenticeship as a machinist, when an accident cost him a finger. Lula is often criticized for his
lack of intellectual sophistication and poor grammatical skills. When all is said and done, he has
certainly come a long way.
One of his older brothers suggested that he be brought onto the board of the machinists
union, which began his political career. Despite his reputation in the United Sates, Lula was
never a Marxist He is a lifelong practicing Catholic whose position on abortion, for instance, has
hardly endeared him to the left.
Lula came to political prominence during the more than twenty years of military rule,
when he helped create the Worker’s Party and became one of the leading advocates of a return to
democracy, along with his unlikely ally, Cardoso.
By the time he finally won the presidency in 2002, he had cut his ties with the far left. As
we will see in the section on public policy, Lula did a lot to reduce inequality in a way that
would not lead observers to mistake him for a firebrand.
Like the Russian constitution, Brazil’s does not bar a former president from running after
spending at least one term out of office. There was some speculation that like Vladimir Putin,
Lula might run again when Dilma Rousseff’s term ends in 2014. He has denied all such rumors,
and there is now little such speculation since he was diagnosed with throat cancer in October
2011. Even if his health recovers, Lula would be seventy-three at the end of her second term and
perhaps too old be a serious candidate.
As we will see in more depth in the rest of the chapter, Cardoso and Lula have done just
about as good a job as one can imagine in consolidating Brazil’s fledgling democracy. Virtually
no one is delighted with everything the two presidents did. Yet, virtually everyone acknowledges
how much they both helped to consolidate the new regime.
There are still occasional rumors about military interference in politics, but pending a
surprise in the 2014 presidential election, that does not seem likely. It also tells us a lot about
how far the country has come in the last sixteen years.
POLITICAL CULTURE
Brazilian political culture is hard to document. Unlike some of the other countries covered in
Comparative Politics, scholars have not done much systematic research on popular values
regarding the regime, no matter who was in power at any one time. And, as we have stressed
throughout the book, it is almost always hard to draw any clear causal link between broad
cultural values and any specific political behavior.
That said, there are at least five key trends we need to keep in mind, however limited the
available data.
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From Rural to Urban
The broad contours of Brazilian political culture were established under colonial rule. As noted
in the section on the country’s history, Portuguese colonists were granted to huge swaths of
territory, where they created the slave-based economy.
Brazil was also a predominantly rural country. Although Brazil specialists rarely use the
term, patron-client relations that are typical of many rural societies were part and parcel with its
political life. In other words, Brazil historically was a hierarchical country dominated by a
―white‖ elite, although it is important to remember that almost no one has purely white ancestry
any longer.
Since the 1930s, however, Brazil has urbanized rapidly to the point that well over half of
the population lives in cities and not just in the megalopolises of Rio and São Paolo. The rapid
migration also made it impossible for many in the elite to turn a blind eye to the poverty that has
its roots in the politics of class and race, which we will see in the next two subsections. At the
same time, the burgeoning millions of middle class Brazilians draw benefits from and pay taxes
to the state. As a result, more and more of them have realized that they have to pay attention to
what happens in Brasilia, their state capital, and their city hall.
Class and Race
Political scientists often argue--probably erroneously--that class is not an important factor in
political life in South America.
They are certainly wrong about Brazil. The centuries-long history of slavery created a
country that was as unequal as any in the Western hemisphere.
As noted previously, Brazil’s wealth is something of an illusion because it is so unevenly
distributed despite the progress made on that front since FHC became presidents. The Gini
coefficient is a statistic that measures the gap between the richest and poorest people in any
country. In 2009, Brazil’s stood at 0.54. That put it in the middle of the Latin American rankings,
only slightly better than Mexico. Note that the Gini coefficient only considers annual income;
figures on net wealth would show even greater inequality.
With the rapid urbanization discussed above, workers and poor people have grown
increasingly aware of that inequality. As we will see in the discussion of the PT in the section on
political parties, class has not been an issue that has shown any signs of tearing the country apart.
Even so, at least until Lula arrived on the scene, there was a sullen resignation and alienation
among many in the working class, especially among the then millions of people who did not
have conventional jobs that paid regular wages
Related to class is race. Thirty years ago, people often talked about Brazil as a post-racial
society because there had been so much intermarriage over the centuries. It is hard to miss the
impact of race in an increasingly urban Brazil. One study showed almost everyone expected
people who ―looked white‖ would hold the key positions in the country’s political and economic
systems.
Despite the changes of the last generation, there are still ways in which race and class
contribute to deep feelings of inequality. To be sure, it is now fashionable for a politician like
Cardoso to point with pride to his black great-great-grandmother. And while it is true that
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disagreements over class and race do not produce much in the way of outrage, the realities of
discrimination have led to a degree of resignation to what students of political culture used to call
a lack of political efficacy. The poorer, the less educated, and the darker-skinned Brazilians are
least likely to think that they can control their own fates.5
Religion
As the basic table at the beginning of the chapter shows, Brazil is an overwhelmingly Catholic
country. However, the statistic that three-fourths of the population is Roman Catholic is
misleading in at least two ways.
First, a significant number of Brazilian Catholics are not particularly observant. The
World Values Survey found that between 35 and 45 percent of the population attends mass
weekly, which actually is quite high for countries with large Catholic populations. Other
estimates put regular mass attendance at one in five, which is more typical of overwhelmingly
Catholic countries. It is not clear how deeply the largely conservative church penetrates the
population if for no other reason than relatively few priests are actually Brazilian. Most have
been sent from Europe by the hierarchy since military rule because of the strong support for
liberation theology among native-born priests. As they saw it, priests and active lay members
argued that the clergy had to play a role in creating a more just and democratic society. Lula
comes from that wing of the Church.
Second, a growing proportion of the population has converted to Protestant
denominations, most notably the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), the Seventh Day Adventists, and
dozens of independent evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Perhaps most important for our
purposes, members of these faiths tend to shun the heavy drinking and partying that have been
such a central part of Brazilian culture.
The most prominent member of the evangelical community is Marina Silva, who came in
a respectable third in the 2010 presidential election. She started out as a leftist and still holds
some radical views. She began her career in the protests led by men who tapped rubber trees,
including her father and Chico Mendes, who was later assassinated. Silva was an early member
of the Labor Party and served as Lula’s environmental minister for more the first six years of his
presidency. She grew frustrated with Lula’s timidity on environmental issues and joined the
Assemblies of God, which is Brazil’s third largest evangelical community. In 2008, she resigned
from the cabinet and served as the Green Party’s standard bearer in the most recent campaign.
Silva is probably not typical of the new evangelicals who are for the most part as
conservative as the Americans who inspired them. Nonetheless, as their numbers grow, it is easy
to see how they could well reshape much of Brazilian politics on the left as well as the right.
5
Alberto Carlos Almeida, ―Core Values, Education, and Democracy,‖ in Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy J. Power,
eds., Democratic Brazil Revisited. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 223–256.
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Democratization
In Brazil
The recent success of democracy in Brazil has many causes. One stands out because of its
parallels with other countries that have made a reasonably effective transition to democracy in
recent years. It rarely takes root because people all of a sudden decide to accept tolerance or
other democratic principles. Instead, they endorse democracy because they see that it works. It
provides them with tangible benefits such as the security that comes from a stable state, effective
public policies, and, usually, a decline in political tension.
Coziness and Corruption: Jeito
Former President Cardoso refers to what he says is the untranslatable term jeito. As he put it,
even at the height of the military dictatorship, ―there is always a way around the system, a certain
tolerance of breaches of authority.‖6 He also tells his readers that one of the first pieces of
political advice he got from his father was to always respect the jailers who imprison you.
That is hardly surprising given the instability that marked the first century of postimperial rule and the fact that the politically active elite was so small and interconnected. You
might be imprisoned today and be back on top a few short years from now. With the exception of
the most repressive years of military rule, very few members of the elite were ever treated all that
harshly, including Cardoso and Lula.
It is impossible to measure the importance of jeito or similar practices in any culture.
However, there is little doubt that they have contributed to the corruption that has been a central
part of Brazilian political life.
Corruption, too, is impossible to measure. However the anecdotal evidence makes it clear
that lots of bribes and other forms of corruption have been at the heart of Brazilian politics from
the beginning. Cardoso and Lula both came to office committed to ending corruption.
Nonetheless, both of their presidencies faced their share of financial scandals that almost cost
them a second term in office.
Gender
As in most countries, men dominate Brazilian politics—and almost all other areas of life for that
matter. Again as in most countries, that is beginning to change in Brazil and perhaps more
rapidly than in other parts of the world. To cite but two very different examples: divorce was
illegal until the 1970s and women’s soccer has never come close to matching the popularity and
fame of men’s soccer in this football-mad country.
As we will see in more detail in the next part of the chapter, two of the three leading
presidential candidates in 2010 were women, and women hold more and more key positions
6
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil. (New York: Public Affairs
Press, 2006), 112.
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professionally. Nonetheless, most observers think that gender roles are more clearly and strictly
defined in Brazil than elsewhere.
It is not clear how much of that is due to each of two factors. The first is the Latin
American notion of machismo that stresses male domination in everything. Most social scientists
think its impact is overstated but that it nonetheless still exists. Second is Brazilians’ apparent
sexual freedom which is epitomized by their love of the beach and the annual Carnival just
before Easter. Here, too, scholars are somewhat skeptical, stressing the importance of pudor
which combines propriety, modesty, and even shame which is common in rural areas and in the
growing evangelical community.
All in all, there are signs that women are beginning to close the gap with men in almost
all areas that count for political scientists. And that progress is likely to accelerate as more and
more women attend university and enter the professional middle class.
That is true throughout society. Thus, soccer has historically been a game played and
adored by men. Even there, things are changing. The Brazilian women lost in the quarter finals
of the 2011 World Cup and are currently ranked third in the world.
Women
In Brazil
Women only gained the right to vote in 1934. It was another forty years before women began to
be elected or appointed to major governmental positions. There is little doubt that women are
still far from equal to men. For instance, almost all domestic workers are women, and not even
half of them are covered by health, unemployment, and other forms of social insurance.
The political status of women has improved during the last half century. Women
(including the current president) played prominent roles in the resistance against military rule
which propelled them to insist on a more visible profile in the new democratic regime. Thus, in
1995, the government passed a law supposedly guaranteeing women thirty percent of the
candidacies on all party tickets. For a variety of reasons, that law has not worked as well as the
comparable one in France (see Chapter 5).
In 2010, the feminist movement focused its attention on reproductive rights and, for the
most part, lost. Abortion is only legal if a pregnancy was the result of a rape or if the mother’s
life is in danger. Despite these already existing restrictions, the left-dominated lower house of the
legislature passed a bill that, in American terms, would have defined the start of life at
conception. This occurred in a country in which twenty per cent of all women admitted to
pollsters that they had had at least one illegal abortion during their reproductive years.
Beyond the Political Side of Political Culture?
We have noted at many points in this book that political culture is an elusive concept in at least
two ways. First, it is hard to demonstrate any direct causal link between these kinds of very
general beliefs and any concrete political actions. Second, it is all but impossible to draw a firm
and indisputable line between the aspects of culture that resonate politically and those that do
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not. In the case of Brazil, for instance, it is hard to argue their love of beaches, Carnival, and the
samba have much of a political impact, although some observers believe that they do.
There are some other aspects that are part of a political nether world in which there are
some links between culture and politics, though they are extremely hard to pin down. At learn
one of them is worth mentioning in passing.
No culture is either homogeneous or, more important, wholly ―home grown.‖ But as
befits a country with so many historical roots, few cultures draw as much on others as Brazil’s.
In fact, the Brazilians have coined a term for it, antropofagia, which one journalist translates as
―cultural cannibalism.‖ Brazilians have ―borrowed‖ norms and values from every wave of
immigrants to the country, starting with the Portuguese and the Africans. Brazil does fall short of
being a discrimination-free, non-racist society. Nonetheless, the fact that it has adopted and
adapted cultural norms from so many places over time means that its value systems (and the
emphasis should be on its multiple subcultures) probably change more rapidly and more often
than those of most other countries included in Comparative Politics.
Government, Regime, and System
Chapter 1 drew the distinction between the government of the day, the regime as laid out in the
constitution and other laws and practices of the system as a whole. As we have just seen, the
empirical evidence on the impact of political culture on any of those levels is hard to come by in
Brazil. Nonetheless, three potentially contradictory conclusions stand out.
First, because of Cardoso and Lula, support for the government is almost certainly at an
all-time high. However, as we will see in the discussion of the 2010 election in the next section,
it is by no means clear that Rousseff will enjoy anything like this level of support or whether that
will matter. Second, the regime erected in the aftermath of military rule in the 1980s is probably
more popular than any in the country’s history. That said, it is still fragile, and again, any weak
president in the near future -- or continued gridlock in the legislative process -- could put the
republic in jeopardy. Third, there is little question that almost all Brazilians endorse the idea of
Brazil. That national pride may be easiest to see in the fanaticism of its soccer fans or the
outlandish celebrations of Carnival in Rio. But patriotism and identification with Brazil as a
country is as strongly entrenched as it is in any country in the Global South.
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
In the last edition of Comparative Politics, interest groups were covered before political parties
and elections in the chapter on Brazil. We organized the chapter that way because many
observers felt that some of those groups were still strong enough to potentially disrupt the new
democratic regime. Because that seems less likely given the 2010 election and other events of the
last few years, we will return to the format used for all the other democratic countries and put
parties and elections first here.
Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 21: Brazil-25
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Parties and Elections
At the end of this section, we will see that the military regime unintentionally helped solidify
interest groups. However, it took a few years after the armed forces left power before we could
say the same thing about political parties and the electoral process, which are much closer to the
heart of just about every theory of democracy. To this day, many scholars claim that the party
system is weak and volatile for at least two reasons. First, almost all of the parties are small and
new; only a few have roots going back to the military regime or beyond. Second, Brazil uses an
unusual electoral system that discourages the kind of disciplined, ideologically driven parties we
saw in Part 2 of this book.
The Electoral System
Brazil uses what is called an open list proportional representation (OLPR). As is the case
with all proportional representational (PR) systems, a party’s number of seats in a national or
state legislature is determined by its share of the vote. In most PR systems, parties provide a list
of candidates, and if one party wins 23 percent of the vote, the 23 percent of the candidates at the
top of its list are elected. The popularity (or lack thereof) matters little, if at all.
Brazil is different. Like many PR systems in large countries, elections are contested and
seats are allocated given the results in each state. In Brazil, however, voters are free to choose
whichever order they want to use to rank the candidates from their party’s list. And because few
states have more than ten seats, candidates tend to run their own campaigns independent of the
party organization. As a result, they have few obligations and little loyalty to the parties that
nominated them. About one-fourth of the deputies in the critical lower house of Congress switch
parties during the course of one term.
Presidential elections, by contrast, use a two-ballot system much like the one pioneered
by Charles de Gaulle in France. Any number of candidates can run in the first round. If no one
wins a majority then (as has always been the case since the end of military rule), a runoff ballot
is held in which only the top two finishers from the first round can run.
In short, presidential elections produce a winner with a majority of the vote. It is rare,
however, for a single party to win more than a quarter of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
Thus, in 2006, Lula was reelected with more than 60 percent of the second ballot vote, whereas
the PT only won 15 percent in the contest for seats in the chamber.
The Parties
To begin with, remember that Brazil limited the right to vote until the end of military
rule. As in most countries, only people who owned a certain amount of property initially had the
suffrage. Gradually, those limitations were eased and removed. However enlisted men (there
were only men) in the armed forces were not included on the electoral rolls until the twentieth
century. Universal suffrage was only achieved in 1985 when illiterates were allowed to vote. At
the same time, the minimum voting age was reduced to sixteen. People between the ages of
eighteen and seventy are legally required to vote, although that law is honored in the breach. In
2010, 82 percent of the eligible voters went to the polls; nine percent of them cast a blank (no
candidate or party selected) or destroyed ballot.
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Despite that history, Brazil has long had political parties. Even during military rule,
elections were contested by two parties, one supportive of and one hostile toward the regime.
The current party system only began to take shape toward the end of the dictatorship and really
only beginning in 1988.
Because of the electoral system and the divided nature of Brazilian society, the country
has lots of political parties; twenty-five contested the 2010 legislative elections, and all but one
of them won at least one seat. Only three broke the ten per cent barrier, which most observers
think is the minimum required to be taken seriously.
There are probably fewer meaningful ideological differences among the major Brazilian
parties than in any of the other countries considered in this book. Because almost all of them are
willing to recruit support from virtually all socio-political groupings, it is hard to speak of a
center of gravity in any of them.
Also be aware that no Brazilian party has an English language version of its website.
The Workers’ Party. At least for now, the PT is the largest party. It was created by Lula and
others in 1980. It was founded by trade union leaders, leftist intellectuals, and supporters of
liberation theology in the Catholic Church. Although Lula was a firebrand in the early years of
the party, neither he nor it were ever Marxist. Instead, the word most commonly used to describe
the PT was populist.
The moderates gradually gained control especially after Lula’s third failed race for the
presidency. As we will see in the policy section, it still supports programs to help the poor and
landless. However, it has accepted the fact that Brazil is a largely capitalist country that must be
competitive in an increasingly globalized international economy, a point we will concentrate on
in the public policy section.
Lula’s and Rousseff’s personal popularity far exceeds that of the PT (see Tables 21.5 and
21.6). In 2006, Lula won 48 and 60 percent of the vote in the first and second rounds of voting.
The PT, however, only won 15 percent in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies held the
same day. It did get more votes than any other party, but the Brazilian Democratic Movement
Party (PMDB) ended with six more seats. Four years later, it outpolled the PMDB by almost four
percentage points and won nine more seats than its coalition partner. Still, it is far from a
majority and seems all but certain to stay that way.
Although the PT has not been touched by as many scandals as the other parties, there
were charges of widespread corruption during the run up to the 2006 campaign, which some
thought might cost it the election. Largely because of Lula’s personal popularity, it survived all
but unscathed.
When Lula named Rousseff as his chosen successor, serious doubts were raised about her
candidacy. She has been a cabinet minister and is currently Lula’s chief of staff. But she had
never run for elected office, had been a revolutionary, and was at best a mediocre campaigner.
As far as we can tell, Lula picked her for two reasons. First, she was both immensely talented
and loyal to the administration. Second, she was one of the few prominent PT politicians not
implicated in a wave of scandals that temporarily removed most of Lula’s team as viable
candidates for higher office.
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And Rousseff’s campaign did not start well. Early polls showed her trailing Jose Serra
of the PSDB (see the next section). Eventually, some combination of Lula’s coattails and her
own competence (despite her dullness) gave her a lead in the polls with a few months to go in the
campaign. As Table 21.6 shows, she ended up winning by more than 10 percent of the vote at the
second or runoff ballot.
Table 21.5
Elections for the Chamber of Deputies since 1988: Today’s Major Parties Only
Party
1994*
1998
2002
2006
2010
PT
12.9
16.8
18.4
15.0
16.9
PMDB
12.8
16.8
13.4
14.6
13.0
PSDB
13.9
9.4
14.3
12.5
11.9
DEM
12.9
9.4
13.4
10.9
7.6
PP
9.4
13.7
7.4
7.1
6.6
*All figures are percentages of vote.
Table 21.6: Presidential Elections since 1988: Top Two Candidates Only*
1994
Cardoso
54
Lula
27
1998
Cardoso
53
Lula
31
2002
Lula
46
Serra
23
2006
Lula
48
Alckmin
42
2010
Rousseff
47
Serra
33
*Percentage of vote at first ballot.
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Brazilian Democratic Movement Party. The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB)
ran a close second to the PT in the 2010 congressional election, winning only nine fewer seats.
However it is very much a junior member of the coalition that supported Lula and Rousseff in
the last two elections. In 2002, it backed Serra but then switched to the PT coalition afterward,
tacitly in 2006 and explicitly in 2010.
It began as the main opposition party during military rule and changed its name to the
PMDB in 1979. It was initially somewhat left of center, but in fact it has always been as
opportunistic as any catchall party in Europe or North America. Its leaders include everyone
from free-market libertarians to people who would pass as left-wing democrats in the United
States. By the 1980s it gained considerable support from the business community and is now
probably the most pro-capitalist party among the top five. Allegedly, it also has more corrupt
politicians than any other party. At this point, it is largely a coalition of regionally powerful
politicians.
Despite being seen as somewhat right of center now, it is a central component of the PT’s
coalition. Depending on the circumstances at the moment, it has had between six and eight
members in the cabinet. It was a critical member of the four-party coalition that supported
Cardoso in 1994 and 1998.
It is hard to tell what the future holds for the party. In 2010, it not only supported
Rousseff but provided her with a running mate, Michel Temer, who is seen as a possible
successor to President Rousseff. But recall that it is a diverse and opportunistic party which is
most likely to head whichever way the political winds are heading.
Brazilian Social Democratic Party. The Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) won the
third largest share of the votes and seats in the 2010 congressional election. Despite its name, the
party has no formal ties to the international social democratic movement (but the PT does). It
also has historically had very few connections to the trade union movement, again the early
bailiwick of the PT. Although it claims to endorse social democratic public policy, it has also
been deeply influenced by neoliberalism. Perhaps most importantly, it has resolutely rejected
populism and authoritarianism.
The PSDB was founded in 1988 in the first years of the transition from military rule. It
was formed mostly by disgruntled members of the PMDB’s predecessor. Its founding team
included Cardoso and others who were neither satisfied with the constitution written in 1988 nor
with the quality of governance under the new civilian regime.
After only six years, the PSDB saw Cardoso elected president. During his two terms, the
party did indeed move significantly rightward as we will see in the section on public policy.
Even though it won almost as many votes as the PT and PMDB in 2010, it probably has
its strongest foothold at the state level where it held seven governorships going into the 2010
campaign. Its presidential candidate that year, Geraldo Alckmin surprisingly won over 40
percent of the vote and forced Lula into a runoff. In 2010, it backed veteran politician Juan Serra,
a former Senator and cabinet minister and currently governor of São Paolo state (which has more
people than Canada). He began the race comfortably ahead in the polls but his support tailed off
even before the formal campaign began.
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Much of the PSDB’s short term future will depend on its choice to run in 2014. At least
three names are already being mentioned. Many thought Serra would retire after his second
defeat, but he has suggested he would return. Geraldo Alckmin, who lost to Lula in 2006, is
currently governor of São Paolo state. Aécio Neves is a former governor and currently has a
senate seat; he is the most charismatic of the three. To complicate matter further, Alckmin and
Neves could easily leave the party if they seek, but don’t get, the nomination.
Perhaps most important of all, the party has seen the PT take over its ideological space on
the center-left. Should it move to the right itself? Should it stay somewhere on the left and hope
that the PT makes a mistake? It is too early to answer these and other questions since Rousseff
has yet to finish the first year of her term, let alone announce whether she will run for re-election.
Democrats. The Democrats are the fourth party having topped 10 percent of the vote in 2006,
though just barely. It fell almost two per cent short of that total in 2010 and lost more than a third
of its sixty-five seats. It lost even more of its support in the less powerful Senate.
The Democrats were founded in 1985 as the Liberal Front. Many of its original leaders
had been involved in ARENA, the party that supported the military dictatorship. One of its first
acts was to support the presidential campaign of Tancredo Neves rather than the military’s
preferred candidate.
Today, it is a more conventional center-right party. It is part of an international collection
of similar parties, most of which had roots in Christian Democracy. It also has close ties to the
business community.
In 2010, it supported Serra at the first ballot and supplied his running mate, Indio da
Costa. It ran on its own in the congressional race and lost a third of its seats. Even more telling is
the fact that it has lost more than sixty of its 105 seats in the last three congressional elections.
That year, it only won two senate races, although it still held four other seats that were not up for
grabs because those elections are staggered.
In short, the days of this party with ties to the old military regime may be numbered.
Progressives. The other seventeen parties won a total of 214 seats in 2010. None won anywhere
near 10 percent of the popular vote.
Two of them are worth noting in passing. First is the Progressive Party (PP) who won 7
percent of the vote and forty-one seats that year. The party was formed under a different name in
1995 after a number of yet smaller groups merged.
Like the Democrats, the Progressives place themselves squarely on the center right. That
said, they have more of a populist bent than the Democrats. While they at least implicitly
supported Lula and Rousseff in presidential elections, the Progressives have not formally joined
either PT president’s legislative coalition.
The PP is also deeply divided especially along regional lines. For example, the
organization in the state of Rio Grande del Sud is extremely conservative. By contrast, the
national leadership has been part of Lula’s governing team for most of his two terms as it was
with Cardoso before him.
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The Progressives also have some links to the former military government. Most notable
here is Paolo Maluf who was the army’s preferred candidate in the first presidential election.
Like a number of his colleagues, he has been tainted by corruption allegations and has been
indicted in New York City for money laundering. (Brazil does not extradite people accused of
such crimes). He was stripped of his official positions in the legislature and the party. However,
the courts decided that a new anti-corruption law could not be applied in his case retroactively.
Therefore, he ran and easily won his 2010 reelection bid.
The Greens. The other wild card in the massive array of smaller groups is the Green Party -- not
so much for its own potential strength but for where the increasingly disgruntled left could turn.
Despite its environmental woes – which extend far beyond the destruction of the Amazonian rain
forest that contribute to global warming -- Brazil’s eco-system is deteriorating as fast as any in
South America. Thus, it is the country where the Greens might have been expected to do quite
well.
However, until the 2010 election, the Greens were anything but an electoral force to be
reckoned with. In the most recent presidential election, it scored something of a breakthrough. Its
popular and charismatic candidate, Marina Silva, won 19 per cent of the vote and came in a
respectable third. As we have already seen, she spent much of her youth with the rubber tree
tapper and activist Chico Mendes before his assassination. And she had been the respected
environmental minister during Lula’s first six years in office, only to resign in frustration with
the administration’s reluctance to take bold steps on global warming or anything else.
Her success may have been both personal and fleeting. The party did do well in the
presidential election but only won 4 percent of the vote and 15 seats in the Chamber of Deputies
election that year. The Greens may suffer, too, because the country has already made some major
environmental strides, for example, by using more ethanol than any other country to replace
gasoline as an automobile fuel.
If the Greens have a future, it will almost certainly have to be as a rallying point for leftist
voters who are dissatisfied with what they believe is the fact that the PT has capitulated to
corporate interests. So far, however, that dissatisfaction has not progressed very far perhaps
because of the egalitarian social service programs that Lula and Rousseff’s governments have
implemented, which we will discuss in the public policy section.
Informal Coalitions
No party has a realistic chance of winning a legislative majority on its own. The electoral system
requires a majority at least on the second presidential ballot, which no candidate is likely to win
with only the support of his or her party. As we have already seen, that is even more the case in a
legislative election where there are such complicated regional factors that we cannot hope to
explain them in a chapter of this length.
Therefore, the parties tend to create informal coalitions at two levels. First, a number of
them band together to support a single candidate in presidential elections. Thus, Lula was
supported by seven parties in addition to the PT, including the PMDP and the Progressives in
2006. Four years later, it was clear from the beginning that the election was a contest between
Rousseff and Serra. Other than the Greens, none of the minor parties won even one per cent of
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the vote. Most decided that a run for the presidency was not worth the time or money and ended
up at least tacitly supporting one of the main candidates. Second and perhaps more important,
after national, state, and local elections, parties form reasonably enduring coalitions. As we will
see in the next paragraphs, Brazil has a presidential system in which no legislature at any level
has the power to cast a vote of no confidence against the executive. Still, parties tend to form
alliances that often last for an entire term.
As political scientists have been noting ever since Lula took office, such coalitions are
increasingly easy to form. Statistical analyses show that all parties—especially on one end or
another of the political spectrum—have moved so much toward the middle that some observers
think that the terms left and right make little or no sense any more.
In other words, the major Brazilian parties have been following what political scientists
used to think is a common strategy, muting their ideological differences to seek voters who
cluster around the middle of the political spectrum. (See also the online chapter on Japan.) In
comparative terms, this wooing of the moderate voter is less true than when such theories were
developed in the 1950s, as we saw in the chapters on the United States, Great Britain, France,
and Germany.
Pressures on the State
Special Interests
People in the United States usually utter the term special interests with at least an implicit snarl
because they are convinced that wealthy people or organizations are able to wield extraordinary,
undeserved, and improper power on their own behalf. In short, interest groups are not liked,
except perhaps for those one agrees with.
At least until Cardoso’s presidency, Brazilian special interests put those in Washington to
shame. The interconnections among the elites meant that a relatively small number of people ran
the country, despite what the constitution said.
The most influential of the special interests were the military and business, which, of
course, were often one and the same. The members of these elites often competed with each
other and periodically threw each other out of positions of authority. Nonetheless, most of the
losers—who had once been winners—returned to positions of influence albeit with different
titles, occasionally in different regimes.
Business
There is some dispute about how close that cooperation was. There is little debate about the fact
that business and related military interests were part of ―the problem,‖ however one chose to
define that term. Together, they were remarkably effective at keeping others out, most notably
Brazil’s labor movement and foreign investors. Instead, observers note the ―Brazil cost,‖
referring to the forms, permits, licenses, and regulations that were supported by these and other
groups who were committed to import substitution.
Today, that has changed. Although we will put off talking about how business-state
cooperation has helped open up the economy until the public policy section, business groups are
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still somewhat divided. Often the same groups support policies that open an economy to global
forces while advocating others that tend to do just the opposite.
The most influential businesses used to be those with the closest relationships with the
military and other authoritarian leaders. Now the key corporations are those that have come to
play a dominant role in both the domestic and export economies and are inclined to adopt
pragmatic and pro-growth strategies.
Consider one recent example. On September 15, 2011, the government implemented a
thirty percent increase on the tax imposed on some cars. Those made in Brazil and in its partner
countries in Mercosur would be exempt. In short, the burden would fall almost completely on
companies that imported cars and trucks in a familiar attempt to protect domestic industries.
What is surprising and different from the past is that these same companies had been lobbying
the government to make it easier (that is, more profitable) for them to export Brazilian vehicles
that lead the way in the use of ethanol and multi-purpose engines that will work with any
available source of energy.
Unions
The authorities—even the military—always tolerated some union activity. But as Lula’s own
career suggests, unions were not significant political forces until quite recently. Lula himself
joined the union at his iron working plant because he wanted better wages and working
conditions, including protection against the kind of industrial accident that cost him a finger.
Lula was reluctant to join a union. He was an apolitical, soccer-loving, beer-drinking
teenager at the time, but he was drawn to the metal workers demand for better salaries, working
conditions, and other concrete benefits. When he joined in the late 1950s, few workers—and no
illiterates—had the right to vote.
Unions did strike and otherwise defend workers’ interests. But in the years before the
military seized power, they had few other opportunities. Under military rule, however, Lula and
his colleagues realized that they had to become far more political and that they could not protect
workers’ interests without ensuring a return to some semblance of democracy. That eventually
led to a broad opposition movement to the military regime and eventually to the creation of the
PT.
The CUT (Unified Workers’ Central, although there are other translations) was one of the
forces that helped form the PT and counted Lula as one of its members. Founded in 1983, it did a
lot to help bring down the military regime and sought to replace existing unions which were at
least partially organized and controlled by the military and big business. Like many parts of
Lula’s coalition, the CUT’s left wing defected at various intervals during his time in power. The
CUT has largely supported the government’s economic policies and participated in the broad
consultative processes discussed above. The formation of the CUT also marked the first time a
major effort was made to both unify the labor movement and weaken the attraction of unions that
were largely organized by and supportive of business owners and managers.
The future of the union movement is probably quite bright, assuming it finds a way to
overcome its internal divisions that essentially pit the far left against moderates. That is the case
because more and more Brazilian workers are entering the formal economy, which means both
that they earn regular wages and are easier to organize.
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The Movement of Landless Workers
An interesting unintended consequence of military rule was the Movement of Landless
Workers (MST www.mstbrazil.org). As we saw in the historical section, Brazil has long had a
massive population of poor people living in its rural areas. Some owned their own land. Most did
not.
Angered and then radicalized under military rule, the MST organized a series of
―occupations‖ of land that was inefficiently farmed or not farmed at all by members of the rural
elite. The statistics about MST are less than reliable, but some suggest that it has 1.5 million
members in every state with a substantial rural population. It began in the early 1980s when as
many as ten thousand families occupied land in one of the poorest southern provinces. MST
itself was formally organized in 1984 just as the military regime was ending.
The 1988 constitution laid out conditions under which poor people could assume control
of under- or un-used land. But the real breakthrough came when land owned by one of President
Cardoso’s relatives was taken over. The president decided to find out how and why this had
happened. He disguised himself as an average farmer (to avoid the press) and talked with MST
leaders.
In time, his administration passed legislation designed to put land occupations under the
rule of law. Nonetheless, it still seeks to restore land to peasants whose property was
expropriated and provide them with debt relief and compensation. It envisions a future in which
family farms and not gigantic agri-businesses dominate this booming economic sector. And, of
course, it continues to support land occupations by landless peasants, however they came to be
landless. It has a lot of work to do. Despite its efforts and its links to the PT, the concentration of
ownership of agricultural land has actually increased in the last generation and is among the most
unevenly divided in the Global South.
The key point to consider here is not whether MST has been right or wrong in its work.
Rather, consider the way that the military regime focused the landless workers’ hostility and how
the Cardoso and Lula administrations both worked to include them, however imperfectly, at the
highest levels of policy making.
THE STATE
As should be clear already, Brazil has not had a stable state for most of its nearly two hundred
years since independence. At least before 1988, the authorities often ignored the constitution
they ruled under, and the rule of law has been honored in the breach for much of its history.
Under the leadership of the last three presidents, the most recent regime may be sinking
more solid roots than any in the past. The military is largely out of the political picture. The
country has gone through two presidential transitions, one of which included the all-important
transfer of power from one ideological team to another. Brazil’s growing role in the global
economy and growth at home gives its regime unusual legitimacy, the reasons for which will be
clearer yet after the section on public policy.
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The Constitution
Brazil is currently being governed under its seventh constitution since independence. France, of
course, has had more, but this is still a lot (earlier ones are summarized at www.vbrazil.com/government/laws/history.html).
The new constitution retains many traditional Brazilian practices while creating a strong
presidency and a large degree of independence for the Congress, states, and municipalities
(www.v-brazil.com/government/laws/constitution.html). It stands in sharp contrast with the one
written in 1967 by the military. It was the first constitution to confirm universal suffrage and ban
the use of torture. At the same time, it incorporated many past practices, some of which have
subsequently had to be altered via referenda, another of its new features.
The only truly significant amendments to the constitution were passed in the 1990s.
During the transition, the military had insisted that the country adopt a system in which the
president would share power with a prime minister, which was not in keeping with Brazilian
political tradition. After the failed leadership of the first presidents, the population voted to return
to a presidential system in a referendum in 1993, rejecting both the prime ministry and a return to
a monarchy. In 1997, as noted above, it was also amended to allow a president to run for a
second term in an attempt to provide more stability by adding a degree of continuity the
institution had previously lacked (for the official site of the entire government, see
www.brasil.gov.br/?set_language=en).
The Presidency
Article 64 of the constitution defines the president’s power. As is the case of most countries with
directly elected presidents, the office is far more influential than any other in Brazil. He or she
names cabinet members and can dismiss them at will. The president can also veto legislation as
well as propose it.
What the president cannot do is compel Congress to accept his initiatives. In that sense,
presidential power is akin to what Richard Neustadt claimed about the United States—it is
mostly the power to persuade. Because of the splintered party system discussed above, recent
presidents have neither had a majority in either house nor many other tools to compel coalition
mates to go along with their wishes.
The most unusual and most important unilateral power the president holds is to issue
decrees. These have the force of law and remain in effect for thirty or sixty days until the
Congress either affirms or denies them. The president issues dozens of them during the course of
a typical year.
Profile
Dilma Rousseff
In the 1970s, no one would have predicted that Dilma Rousseff would become president. First of
all, she was a woman, and women played next to no role in Brazilian politics, let alone at its
highest levels. Second, she was an activist in the movements that opposed the military junta,
spent some time as an urban guerilla, and was in prison from 1970 until 1972.
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By the same token, Rousseff was also an unlikely revolutionary. Her father was an upper
middle class merchant and an immigrant from Bulgaria. Like many privileged young people of
her generation, she joined the resistance against military rule that increasingly had little choice
but to turn violent.
After her release from prison, Rousseff finished her education, began her career as an
economist, and later was a co-founder of the PT. Alter Lula’s inauguration, she became Minister
of Energy. Three years later, she became his chief of staff after a corruption scandal forced a
number of more prominent and experienced colleagues to resign.
Rousseff soon emerged as the most likely PT candidate to succeed Lula. What is even
more surprising about her is that she had never run for office before and is one of the least
charismatic politicians in a country in which such men and women are the norm.
Congress
Like almost all countries, Brazil has a bicameral legislature. Unlike those in parliamentary
systems, neither the Chamber of Deputies nor the Federal Senate can cast a vote of no
confidence on the cabinet.
But as in most countries, the two houses of Congress must approve a bill before it
becomes law, including presidential decrees once their temporary legal status expires
(www2.camara.gov.br/english). The President can veto all or part of any bill. If that happens, the
bill is sent back to Congress for reconsideration. A veto can only be overridden by an absolute
majority of both houses taken by secret ballot. If the President and Congress remain at an
impasse, there is a reconciliation process in which the two houses meet in joint session. The
vetoed bill becomes law if both agree to it.
As we were writing, President Rousseff vetoed portions of a bill that would have granted
amnesty to people who illegally cut down trees on public lands and loosened restrictions on
people who wished to do so in the future. Most of the cleared land is used for cattle grazing and
is alleged to be one of the major causes of climate change. The two houses had yet to reconsider
the deforestation bill as this chapter went to press.
Chamber of Deputies
The Chamber has 513 members, who are elected on a state-wide basis using the unusual version
of proportional representation discussed above. The number of seats from each state is
determined largely by population, but the smallest ones have at least eight members and the
largest no more than seventy. The Chamber does not have unique powers such as those given the
U.S. House of Representatives to initiate bills involving taxation and revenue. In short, it and the
Federal Senate are roughly equal in power.
The one peculiar feature of the Chamber is that about a quarter of its members typically
change parties during the course of a four-year term. That might seem like a recipe for chaos, but
it has not turned out that way under either Cardoso or Lula. Instead, deputies defect to parties in
their own ideological camp, usually to reinforce their own influence within the government or
opposition. In fact, party discipline is stronger than it is in most fragmented systems in large part
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because, as noted previously, the parties normally agree to form a coalition for the length of the
combined presidential and legislative terms.
The Federal Senate
The Federal Senate is much smaller and more closely connected to state politics than the
Chamber of Deputies. Three senators are elected from each state along with three from the
federal capital of Brasilia. They serve eight-year terms with two-thirds of them chosen at one
national election and one-third at the next. Unlike the deputies, senators are selected from a
nonpartisan ballot with each voter casting two votes in years when two-thirds of the seats are
open.
The Senate has the same basic powers as the Chamber but is less disciplined in large part
because elections for it are held on a non-partisan basis. Currently, the Senate is headed by
former President José Sarney who has twice held the job in the last decade. Because of its link to
state politics and smaller size, the Senate has been the launching pad for more national
politicians than the Chamber of Deputies.
Perhaps for that same reason, Senators have faced more corruption allegations than
members of the Chamber. In 2009, they touched its leader, José Sarney, when it was revealed
that the 181 senior civil servants in the Senate (remember, there are only eighty-one senators)
received bonuses to their six-figure salaries the year before. Then Sarney was accused of taking
an unwarranted $2,000 housing stipend to live in Brasilia even though he already owned a house
there. Given the culture of coziness and the history of corruption in Brazil, this is not expected to
cost the seventy-year-old Sarney much. Some of the civil servants lost their jobs, but, as Seth
Kugel of GlobalPost.com put it, ―get caught in a scandal in Brazil, you might lose your job.
You’ll almost never go to jail‖ (www.globalpost.com/dispatch/brazil/090804/brazilian-senatescandals-guide?page=0,1).
The Rest of the State
Brazil has a well-established legal system, although its legitimacy and honesty often were
doubted under military rule. As is the case in most federal systems, the courts are primarily
organized at the state and municipal levels. Only the Supreme Federal Court is politically
important for us to consider in passing because it has the power of judicial review. The court has
eleven members who choose its president and vice president. They are appointed by the
president and confirmed by the senate and can serve until they are seventy. One observer called
it the most overworked court in the world, dealing with over 100,000 cases in 2008. Its
proceedings have been televised for almost a decade. At times, its decisions truly matter. Thus,
in May 2011, it voted 10-0 to allow ―stable‖ gay and lesbian couples to form civil unions,
although it stopped short of endorsing same sex marriage.
The civil service, by contrast, reflects the ambiguities of Brazilian institutions and its elite
political culture. As in most advanced industrialized countries, senior-level bureaucrats are first
recruited on the basis of examinations that are administered by semi-private testing agencies.
However, because it is all but impossible to fire civil servants and because they receive huge
pensions after leaving office, the bureaucracy has become one of the most corrupt and inefficient
components of the state. One only has to read accounts of how difficult it has been historically
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for foreign businesses to gain a foothold in Brazil to see how powerful theses unelected officials
are.
As we have already seen, Brazil is also a federal state. Much power has been given to the
twenty-six states and the federal district of Brasilia. They, in turn, have to share power with
municipalities, which share the characteristics of U.S. cities in urban areas and counties in the
countryside. Again as we have already seen, large states and cities have been venues where a
number of politicians launched political careers, more so than in most countries covered in
Comparative Politics.
Figure 21.1: Decision Making in Brazil
PUBLIC POLICY
Any discussion of Brazilian public policy has to revolve around three aspects of its political
economy: eradicating inequality and poverty, long-term economic growth, and its growing role
as one of the world’s most important emerging markets. Progress on all three fronts has been
nothing short of spectacular over the last decades, including during the period of military rule.
Boom Not Bust
Although statistics are not always reliable, the Brazilian economy probably grew faster than any
other country – aside from Japan -- from 1900 into the 1980s.7 It took policies enacted under
7
This section draws heavily on Thomas Prideaux, ―Brazil: Special Report.‖ The Economist, 12 November 2009 and
Larry Rohter, Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ch
6.
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Cardoso to put the country on what looks like firm economic footing today, when its economy is
one of the most dynamic in the world. Like the other BRICS, it has prospered even during the
current recession. It is now part of the G20 group of countries that is rapidly replacing the G8 of
wealthy nations as the key multilateral economic policy-making body. As David Gordon of the
Eurasia Institute put it on National Public Radio on February 7, 2010, as the ―mature‖ markets in
Europe are struggling with massive debt and a falling euro, the ―emerging‖ markets in the
BRICS and beyond are surging.
As with all the long term economic shifts discussed in Comparative Politics, we cannot
make the case that state policies are wholly responsible for periods of either boom or bust. As we
saw in Chapter 17, that is especially true today when the forces of the increasingly
interdependent global market is limiting what any state can do to shape its own economic future.
Nonetheless, any explanation of the current economic surge growth has to start with the
stabilization of the currency as part of the Plan Real adopted when Cardoso was Minister of
Finance in 1994. Cardoso was not the first leader to tackle the inflation that had long been an
endemic problem. The military, for instance, tried to restrict price and wage increases to no avail.
At best, they slowed the inflation a bit, but it is hard to give them too much credit since inflation
reached a peak of nearly 3,000 percent during a single twelve month period in 1989 and 1990. In
yet another example of the economic malaise, Brazil used eight different currencies in the
twentieth century, including four between 1986 and 1990 alone.
Cardoso, Lula, and Rousseff do not deserve all the credit. Some important steps were
taken under Fernando Collor de Mello, the otherwise disgraced former president, who opened
the country to more foreign trade and investment.
As Finance Minister, FHC overcame tremendous political opposition and introduced yet
another new currency, the real. Initially, its value was tied to that of the United States dollar with
its exchange rate floating within a narrow band around the North American currency. In 1999, it
was allowed to float freely and is now worth about fifty-five cents depending on market
conditions.
Inflation ground to a halt. It had averaged about 45 percent per month in early 1994; after
the introduction of the real it dropped to 2 percent that July. Steep budget cuts were introduced,
cementing Cardoso’s reputation as a neo-liberal.
The introduction of the real also propelled Cardoso into the presidency later that year. He
had fully expected Lula to win, which he was convinced would have put the fiscal progress in
jeopardy. Therefore, he decided to run against his former comrade (see Table 21.5).
For the next eight years, he continued his policy of stimulating growth through a more
open economy based on stable prices. Lula and Rousseff continued his policies, albeit putting
more emphasis (or at least giving more publicity) to the ways sustained growth reduced poverty
and inequality. In short, the reforms of the last quarter century tamed many of Brazil’s economic
demons in ways that have benefited just about everyone.
The signs of success are everywhere. All of the world’s major automobile companies
make cars in Brazil where they also develop fuel-saving technologies. The new competitive spirit
means that domestic ―big box‖ stores have largely beaten off competition from European and
American firms. Sometimes, too, Brazilian based firms have had to either merge or form
alliances with foreign firms. In some cases, though, the impetus and clout comes from Brazil, as
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when the Brazilian firm InBev bought the American icon, Anheuser-Busch. In fact, a Brazilian
now runs the company that brews America’s favorite beer, Budweiser.
There is no denying that Brazil is an economic powerhouse. From 1994 through the great
recession, Brazil grew as fast or faster than any country in the Western hemisphere. Its growth
rate will probably slow in 2011, but at an estimated 3.5 per cent, it is something that leaders
elsewhere in the western hemisphere would envy.
Again, the state cannot take the credit for all these changes. More dynamic business
leaders, growing exports and imports, and the impact of a globalizing economy all played a role.
Yet we cannot ignore the role of the state in forging relationships between the public and private
sectors at home and abroad. These links were first created under the discredited corporate system
under Vargas in the 1930s. But now they have dominated economic life and seem to coexist with
a functioning democratic rule.
Manufacturing
The most obvious examples lie in manufacturing where Brazil is now home to a number of world
class companies. For example, Brazil is now the fifth largest automobile producer, having
surpassed France. For a political scientist, the most important thing to note is the fact that many
were initially state enterprises that have only been fully or partially privatized.
One of the most successful is Embraer (www.embraer.com). It started as a company that
made training airplanes for the Brazilian military, and it never made any money. In 1994, it was
privatized along with other failing state enterprises. It then made the decision to enter the
passenger airline market but not take on Boeing or Airbus. Instead, it is by far the world’s largest
manufacturer of commuter and other short-haul airliners—its largest model seats 108. The odds
are that if you have flown on a shorter route, it has been in an Embraer. That list includes the
former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose campaign plane was an Embraer, despite
her ―buy American‖ pronouncements. In truth, she had little choice.
Some of the economic ―stars‖ are still mostly owned and/or managed by the state. The
most important of these is Petrobras (http://www.petrobras.com.br/en/), which is the largest
company in Latin America. By some accounts, it is the fourth largest company in the world with
assets more or less equal to Microsoft’s.
Formed as a state monopoly in 1953, it was partially sold to private investors in 1997,
although the state still owns a controlling interest. By that time, it had discovered and begun to
exploit vast offshore oil fields. It was partially privatized in part so it could raise the investment
capital needed to become a world leader in that segment of the petrochemical industry. As early
as 2006, Brazil became energy self-sufficient and will probably become one of the four or five
leading exporters once the recently discovered Sub-Salt fields come on line later in this decade.
The field may have as many as 80 billion barrels of oil which is more than the proven reserves of
the rest of the countries in the western hemisphere combined. Sub-Salt will make hundreds of
billions of dollars for Petrobras and its investors. But in keeping with the new economic spirit of
the times, the PT describes Sub-Salt as ―patrimony of the Union, wealth of the people, future of
Brazil.‖ Profits from Sub-Salt will mostly be used for long term development and other projects
designed to end the lingering, but still significant, inequality.
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São Paolo is home to most of Brazil’s world-class companies. Although Rio de Janeiro
gets most of the publicity, São Paolo is the country’s economic hub. The city and state have
forty-five million inhabitants. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was built largely by immigrants who
may have brought wealth into the area. It is, for instance, the home of Brazil’s financial
community and, by some calculations, is the fourth richest city in the world.
Agriculture
Most orthodox economists downplay the contribution that agriculture can make toward
economic development. Brazil is very much the exception. Unlike the other BRICS or the G8
countries, its growth has also been fed by a booming and modernized agricultural sector.
Brazil has always been an agricultural leader, selling coffee, sugar, cocoa, and tobacco in
the United States and beyond. However, most of its farms were inefficiently run by absentee
landlords who also happened to be part of the country’s political elite.
That scenario has also changed with the financial and industrial reforms to the point that
fully 40 per cent of its exports come from the agricultural sector. And it has chosen what to
produce and markets it well.
Such countries as China and Japan have little spare land for agricultural production.
Brazil does. To make inroads in these and other potential markets, Brazil diversified its farming
sector so that it was no longer dependent on just a few commodities and is now one of the top
exporters of many agricultural products. Thus, it sells more soybeans to China than any other
country. In addition to soya products, Brazil also has carved out a global niche in sugar, citrus
products, various meats, and oil seeds. It did all of this without sacrificing its traditional crops.
As many other agricultural exporters have learned, diversification is important because it does
not leave a country vulnerable to the rapid switch between high and low prices that have so often
devastated those countries that are dependent on a single or a handful of crops.
Many of the key companies are state-controlled if not state-run. For example, Embraper
has bred a pig that yields meat that is lower in fat and cholesterol than anything grown in the
American Midwest. It is also a leader in biotechnology and bioengineering, now having
developed an herbicide-resistant soybean that should be competitive with Monsanto’s product in
the next year or two.
How did Brazil do it? As with manufacturing, the answer is complicated, but the state
played multiple roles. For one, it encouraged companies like Embrapa
(http://www.embrapa.br/english) to cultivate previously fallow land. And, like Petrobras, it has
been allowed to sell shares and has been encouraged to open sales and marketing offices around
the world. State governments have gotten into the act as well. A foundation run by the state of
São Paolo has focused on genomics, identifying the genetic code of dozens of productive plants
and pesticides.
Finally, the government has spearheaded the sale of land to well over a million farmers
who had previously worked as tenants and laborers on vastly inefficient farms owned by
absentee landlords. Ultimately, Brazil will have to decide between its current support for both
small farms and agribusiness. For now, it can do both without jeopardizing many, if any,
profitable opportunities.
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Energy
Perhaps most important and most surprising of these trends is that in the middle of the
last decade, Brazil joined a handful of countries that are energy self-sufficient. That
accomplishment is both a testament to its abundant natural resources and to the way both its
governmental and business elites have fashioned energy policy.
We have already seen that Brazil is a world leader in using ethanol as an automobile fuel.
Ethanol is controversial in the United States where it is made from corn, which is not a very
efficient source of energy. Brazil uses sugar cane, which yields about six times as much energy
as corn per kilogram.
Similarly, as we also saw, Brazil is rapidly becoming a world leader in oil and gas
production and will become a major exporter within a few years. Here, it had the benefit of
joining the market relatively late. However, it is at least as important that the government
sparked research and development through Petrobras and other companies which it influences or
owns.
Brazil is also taking advantage of its hydroelectric system. A series of dams and other
installations already provide the country with almost all of its electricity. And, not surprisingly
given its climate, Brazil is likely to become a leader in solar energy production and, in time, of
selling equipment for it in global markets.
Finally, Brazil is one of the least carbon-intensive countries among the world’s industrial
leaders. Reliable statistics are scarce, but roughly half of Brazil’s energy comes from renewable
sources. It remains a major emitter of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and it has been
reluctant to make major commitments to the Kyoto Protocol and other efforts to curb climate
change. That should not keep us from seeing the progress that has been made and seems all but
certain in the near future.
The energy boom has rekindled two political debates. The first is over what the role of
the state should be in any of the policy areas considered in this section. There are critics on the
left who want policy to be more egalitarian and on the right who advocate a freer market. For
now, however, there seems to be a broad consensus that the state is acting in a more or less
reasonable way. Second, the Greens and their allies in particular continue to worry about the
growing pollution, the continued destruction of rain forests, and other environmental threats.
Here, too, there seems to widespread agreement that the government’s decision to use profits
from the energy sector to address environmental and other social needs is largely on target.
Economic Liberalization
In Brazil
As the text suggests, Brazil has done a lot to open up economic opportunities for both its own
private sector and foreign investors. In large part, that has involved selling off all or part of
nationalized industries such as those noted in the text.
As we saw in the chapter on Britain, there is nothing unusual about a state selling some or
all of its assets. However, these two cases are quite different. The British followed what one
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team of scholars called principled privatization. When the Blair and Thatcher governments sold
off companies, they held on to very few shares and could exert little leverage over the new
companies. The Brazilians have been more like the French whom the same scholars labeled
pragmatic privatizers. They sold only the companies that would operate better in an open market
environment with its competitive pressures. Even then, they kept a large block of shares in their
hands or in those of their allies to limit the possibility of foreign takeovers of industries deemed
to be in the national interest.
The Ambiguous Role of the State
Not everyone who studies Brazil is enamored with the last three governments’ social and
economic policies. Indeed, criticisms come from both the left and the right.
Leftists think Cardoso and Lula sold out their admittedly quite different left-wing
credentials and that Rousseff seems to be following suit. Cardoso is most harshly attacked for
Plan Real and, more important, for adopting the neoliberal agenda. There is more than a germ of
truth to this argument, but these skeptics miss the reduction in inequality put in place during his
two terms. They are almost as harsh in their analyses of Lula. They accuse him of accepting the
third way (which is true), first championed by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. What they forget is
that Lula was never a doctrinaire socialist and has always sought ways for Brazil to progress
which, to him, required making his peace with a predominantly capitalist world.
The right-wing concerns are mostly from orthodox advocates of free market economics.
They point to the mass of regulations that still exist and to the weakness of Brazil’s corporate
and bankruptcy law. They accurately cite plans to maintain as much national and state control of
the economy as possible. To cite but one example, they oppose Lula’s plan to require that all
equipment made for the offshore oil wells be manufactured in Brazil. All but the most orthodox
economists acknowledge the progress Brazil has made and give Cardoso most of the credit and
Lula most of the blame for slowing down the opening of the market.
Flattening the Hierarchy
Before Vargas—let alone Cardoso—came to power, inequality was not something most
Brazilian elites paid much attention to, even though the gap between rich and poor was as wide
as it was anywhere in the world. Because the population was so heavily interracial, race, too, was
rarely discussed.
By the time Cardoso came to power, neither race nor poverty could be ignored. One
could not avoid the overwhelming number of black people who lived in the slums surrounding
Rio, São Paolo, and the other major cities. Newspapers in the 1990s featured stories of teenage
boys who had little or no hope of a meaningful job and spent their time ―surfing‖ on the top of
commuter trains, daring each other to jump off at top speed. Both Cardoso and Lula sought to
reduce the stigma of poverty and race. Given their respective backgrounds in the traditional elite
and impoverished working class, they did so differently. It is hard not to be impressed by how
much more egalitarian Brazilian society has become due to their efforts. All the signs are that
Rousseff will continue to move public policy in that same direction.
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Addressing Poverty
As Brazil has become more urban and prosperous, it has developed arguably the world’s most
rapidly growing middle class. According to one study, half the population makes between $1,000
and $2,750 a month, which puts them squarely in the middle class by Brazilian standards.
Another sixteen percent makes even more, including 200 or so households with a net worth of
$100 million or more. That means that many more people can buy cars, homes, and wide-screen
televisions. By January 2008, for example, 122 million cell phones were in use, a remarkable
total for a country of not quite 200 million people. About half of the country has access to cable
or satellite television, and the overall internet connection rate rivals what we find in the United
States or Europe.
Readers who live, like we do, in North American suburbs should not read too much into
this data. Millions of people live in favelas. No one can give an exact number since no one has
developed a commonly accepted definition what makes a community in one of these ramshackle
slums on the outskirts of the biggest cities. The most depressing estimate is that as many as half
of Rio’s six million residents live in one of them. Most of the favelas were constructed illegally.
People build primitive homes from whatever materials they can find. Few have electricity or
running water. The favelas are, however, just the tip of the iceberg of Brazilian poverty.
Overall, Lula’s government estimated that almost 20 percent of the country lived in
poverty during the run up to the 2002 and 2006 elections. No one knows for sure what the exact
figure is. Millions of people live on the minimum wage which was set at $326 a month in 2011.
Millions more actually live on less since they work outside the formal economy and are not
subject to the minimum wage law.
The last three governments have done a good job of addressing poverty—even if they
have drawn the most attention for their broader economic reforms. Much of the credit has to be
given also to a series of social service programs begun under Cardoso and expanded under Lula,
the most important of which is the Bolsa familia. These family grants are not terribly different
from those we saw in the chapters on France and Mexico. They are small, averaging about $12
per child per month. Nonetheless, they have allowed millions of Brazilian families to navigate
their way out of long-term poverty. One study found that the number of children not attending school
declined by 36 percent. The rate of childhood malnutrition was cut by two-thirds. Overall, during the first
decade of this century, the program is credited for moving at least three million Brazilians out of extreme
poverty, which the UN defines as lacking food, health care, and other basics needed to enjoy at least a
subsistence standard of living, which has been pegged at the equivalent of roughly $1.25 a day.
In June 2011, the Rousseff government announced the creation of a new program, Brasil Sem
Miseria (Brazil Without Poverty). It would expand Bolsa Familia coverage by transferring funds to the
poorest region such as the Northeast. Even more important, it shifts the responsibility from poor people,
who previously had to take the initiative in seeking aid, to the state to assure that poor people have access
to programs designed to help them. As Minister for Social Development Tereza Campello put it, "for that
we need to change the mindset that it is up to a poor person to come to the state, and ensure that
the state reaches out to the poor person."
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Race
Brazilian leaders long avoided the question of race. They pointed to the fact that the country has
been even more of an ethnic melting pot than the United States. To Brazil’s credit, the leading
candidates for the presidency in 2010 are of Italian (Serra) and Bulgarian (Rousseff) origin.
In fact, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, racial discrimination remains an
important part of Brazilian political, social, and economic life. The higher you go in any
hierarchy (other than soccer and pop culture), the higher the percentage of white-looking people
you find.
The myth of the country as a ―post-racial‖ democracy has evaporated over the last eighty
years. After 1930, black activists organized the quilambismo movement, named for the
communities to which runaway slaves escaped in the nineteenth century.
But it was only in the 1980s and beyond that the country seriously attacked racial
discrimination. The effort began under Cardoso who instituted the first affirmative action
programs. Lula took the programs to end racial discrimination one step farther when he created
the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality during his first month in office in
2003. That was followed by more affirmative action programs that guarantee slots in universities
and the civil service for Afro-Brazilians. By 2007, almost all of the major federal public
universities had established quotas for black and public school students (often one and the same).
As in the United States, there are movements that demand financial reparations for the
descendants of slaves, though they are not likely to succeed in either country.
Brazil and the World: How Wrong Was Stefan Zweig?
When Zweig claimed that Brazil would always be a country of the future, he could not
have anticipated the changes of the last quarter century. One of the reasons Zweig thought Brazil
would never reach its potential was its normally unmet foreign policy goals. As the largest
country in South America, it was a regional power. However, it was poorer than at least Chile
and Argentina most of the time, so its regional power was almost purely geopolitical. Its impact
outside South America was negligible.
As with everything else in this book, the emergence of Brazil and the other BRICS has
many causes. One of the most important of them has been the opening of the economy at
precisely the same time that everyone started using the term ―globalization.‖
Until Cardoso took office, Brazil maintained a reasonably strict policy of import
substitution. Surprisingly, the government did not encourage exports. And it sharply restricted
the amount of direct foreign investment in the country in part by limiting how large a share of a
company that foreigners could own.
The government has sharply reduced those limits in two ways. First, it has partially
privatized a lot of nationalized companies, the most important of which is Telebras, the
telecommunications giant. Like most countries, it has also allowed foreign competitors to enter
the market, albeit with a Brazilian partner. Second, even companies Petrobras and the Banco do
Brasil float shares on the stock exchange, although the government still sharply limits the
percentage of a company foreigners can own and otherwise controls enough shares to make
foreign takeovers all but impossible.
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The net result of this has been a massive influx of direct foreign investment. When the
Real Plan took effect, foreigners invested less than a billion dollars a year in Brazil. Today, the
annual figure is over $30 billion and amounts to 1.6 percent of Brazilian GDP. In addition to the
legal changes on imports, the dramatic reduction in inflation produced by the Plan Real made a
difference because it gave investors a degree of certainty about what would happen to their
money.
Brazilian companies have also become major exporters now with the explicit support of
the government. Embraer, for instance, sells more than 90 percent of its airplanes abroad. It has
even established a joint venture to manufacture airplanes in China. Similarly, most of the major
banks have opened offices abroad. They were initially created primarily to serve the expatriate
community, but increasingly they are becoming minor players in the financial markets in a host
of countries.
Brazil has also become a trading nation. Exports in the sectors discussed above and more
account for 30 per cent of GDP in an average year. For the last decade or so, Brazil has had a
normal annual trade surplus of about $25 billion, which is far higher than other developing
countries. It is diversifying its trade so that, unlike Mexico, it is not heavily dependent on a
single trading partner.
Furthermore, Brazil is adding value to the goods it produces and doing so through
companies that are at least largely Brazilian-owned. To return to agriculture for a moment, Brazil
is home some of the world’s largest meat-packing companies that more than hold their own
against the likes of Purdue and Cargill.
Finally, Brazil is developing its own multinational corporations. None have made into
Fortune magazine’s list of the top 100. Nonetheless, Brazil is home to 114 of the top 1,000
multinationals in emerging markets, bested only by China and India.
In short, the words ―Brazil‖ and ―superpower‖ are not spoken together as some sort of
political joke as they were when FHC published his book, Dependence and Development in
Latin America. Like most left-of-center academics of his day, the future president thought Brazil
was caught in the trap of dependent development that has hindered the progress of most of the
Global South (also see Chapter 11). Little did he know that Brazil would change so much and so
fast, let alone that the state would have a lot to do with its transformation.
Strangely enough, like many countries that have been ruled by the military for extended
periods, Brazil has rarely been a major player in international relations defined in conventional
terms. Whatever the domestic situation, Brazil has not been at war for more than half a century
and then only barely. Brazil supported the Allies in World War I, although it did not actually
enter the conflict. It did join the Allies in battle in 1942. Its ships patrolled the Atlantic, and an
expeditionary force of about 25,000 men participated in the invasion of Italy. Other than that,
Brazilian troops have not seen combat in more than a century.
As would only make sense for a country with a long history of military engagement in
political life, it has kept its military up to date. There were even rumors in the 1970s and 1980s
that it was considering building an atomic bomb. After the military regime fell, Brazil ended its
fledgling program and signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
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Most important of all, Brazil is becoming a superpower of a new kind, defined not by the
power of its weapons but by the power of its economy. And here we see broader importance of
the material in the previous section.
As we saw more generally in Chapter 17, globalization is altering almost all definitions
of what it means to be powerful early in the twenty–first century. There is no better indicator of
that than the claims Brazil, India, Germany, and Japan have made for permanent seats on the
U.N. Security Council with the same veto power as the United States, Britain, France, Russia,
and China.
Joining the debate over the future of the Security Council would take us too far into the
part of political science that international relations scholars claim as their own. Even on a
superficial level, however, Brazil can make a solid case for that seat. Cardoso and Lula both
enjoyed some success in brokering a degree of détente between the United States and Cuba. It is
becoming a significant donor of foreign aid, especially to those countries it tends to agree with
and which could use Brazilian expertise, most notably in combating HIV/AIDS. Brazil has
participated in close to thirty peacekeeping missions under United Nations auspices and has led
the mission in Haiti since 2010. The general who led the peacekeepers was killed in the
earthquake. Most importantly, Brazil has been one of the leaders in expanding the ―family‖ of
leading countries from the G-8 to the G-20.
Whether Brazil will get a seat on the Security Council is anyone’s guess and takes us
beyond the scope of this book. We have argued time and time again that the division between
international relations and comparative politics is increasingly artificial. Nonetheless, a
discussion of the twists and turns of U.N. politics would make a very long book and chapter even
longer.
Globalization
In Brazil
Many commentators have complained about the toll globalization has taken in the Global South.
Whatever its merits in general, it is hard to make that case for Brazil or the other BRIC
countries, other than Russia. It has opened its markets and sought to sell its own goods and
services abroad.
It will take some time before scholars figure out exactly why Brazil and a handful of
other countries confounded the naysayers. But there is little question that they have.
So far.
THE MEDIA
Not surprisingly for a country with its history, Brazil has a large and diversified array of
newspapers and magazines that concentrate on politics. It was not always that way. The
Portuguese only allowed the first printing presses into the country in the early nineteenth
century. And given the fact that so many people were illiterate until recently, newspapers and
magazines were bound to have a limited circulation. As a result, only about 60 of every 1,000
homes received a newspaper regularly in the middle of the last decade. Several of the papers are
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of an extremely high quality, including The Rio Times, which publishes in English
(www.riotimesonline.com).
Television now reaches the entire country either over the air or via cable/satellite
distribution. Like television everywhere, the Brazilian system is a mixture of home-made and
imported programming. Brazilian television is best known for its telenovelas or soap operas that
last no more than a few episodes but otherwise look and feel like the much longer running ones
in the United States or Britain; in fact, it seems that the prime time television soap opera was
invented in Brazil in 1951. That said, television networks, such as O Globo, have also had a
significant political impact. For instance, some supported the military until the bitter end; others
moved into opposition.
Organizations like O Globo are media empires, most of which were founded and built by
conservative financiers. However, control of the media is probably far less concentrated than in
the United States. And television viewers in particular can easily find a wider range of political
points of view on their screens.
CONCLUSION: AFTER LULA?
At the beginning of every year, The Economist sends its subscribers a special edition on what to
expect in the next twelve months. The magazine’s writers rarely have kind things to say about
leftists. Nonetheless, in 2010 they gave Lula credit for the fact that Brazil is ―enjoying its best
moment for a long time.‖
Within three paragraphs, Thomas Prideaux expressed tremendous confidence in the
administration to come, more perhaps than even we would. He predicted a smooth transition
from the highly charismatic Lula to whichever of the highly noncharismatic candidates who were
the campaigning to succeed him. So far, history has proved him right.
Everything is not perfect in a country that has handled the current recession as well as
any. Nonetheless, inflation and the government deficit are both up. President Rousseff plans to
cut about $200 billion from its 2011 budget which means, among other things, that the minimum
wage will rise less than the cost of inflation.
Other uncertainties loom on the political horizon. Will the bland Rousseff continue her
initial success despite her lack of charisma? And what will Lula do in 2014 or even 2018 when
the constitution’s term limit provisions would no longer apply to him, assuming he survives his
bout with cancer?
We will have to wait and see.
Key Terms
Concepts
dependency
favelas
import substitution
jeito
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liberation theology
mulatto
open list proportional representation (OLPR)
pacting
positivism
People
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique
da Silva, Luiz Ignacio Lula
Kubitschek, Juscelino
Lula
Pedro I, Emperor
Rousseff, Dilma
Vargas, Getúlio
Acronyms
BRICS
MST
OLPR
PMDB
PP
PSDB
PT
Organizations, Places, and Events
Bolsa familia
Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB)
Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB)
Chamber of Deputies
Democrats
Estado Novo
Federal Senate
Movement of Landless Workers (MST)
Plan Real
Progressive Party (PP)
tenentes
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Treaty of Torsedillas
Workers Party (PT)
Useful Websites
Good Websites on Brazil in English are hard to come by. Here are a few that I have found most
useful. Brazzil.com (yes this is spelled right) and v-brazil.com are commercial portals that
frankly do a better job on tourism than politics, but they are good places to start. Photius.com is
the work of a Greek Web wizard who seems to maintain his site out of the goodness of his heart.
It is probably less comprehensive but maybe more useful.
www.brazzil.com
www.v-brazil.com/government/
www.photius.com/countries/brazil/government/index.html
The Brazilian government’s official site will take you most places you would want to go inside
the formal institutions.
http://www.brasil.gov.br/?set_language=en
NACLA is a left of center think tank on Latin America based in New York City. Brazil is not
always one of the countries it focuses on, but there is good material in its archives if not its front
page.
www.nacla.org
A number of Brazilian newspapers publish an English edition, which is usually abridged. The
Rio Times is written in English, and I found it the most valuable.
www.riotimesonline.com
Further Reading
Bourne, Richard. Lula of Brazil: The Story So Far. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008. An excellent personal and political biography. Unfortunately, it ends with the end
of his first term.
Cardoso, Frederico Hernrique. The Accidental President. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. A
largely self-laudatory but occasionally insightfully self-critical book by the former
president.
Fausto, Boris. A Concise History of Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. The
best short history in English by a Brazilian who is also a friend of former President
Cardoso.
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Kingstone, Peter, and Timothy Power, eds. Democratic Brazil Revisited. Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.
Kinzo, Maria d’Alva, and James Dunkerley, eds. Brazil Since 1985: Economy, Polity, and
Society. London: Institute for Latin American Studies, 2003.
Levine, Robert H. The History of Brazil. London: Palgrave, 1999. The best short book on the
country’s history that necessarily focuses on themes rather than details.
Page, Joseph A. The Brazilians. New York: Da Capo, 1995. Somewhat dated and more about
social than political trends. But for someone who knows little or nothing about Brazil,
this is a great place to start.
Prideaux, James. ―Brazil: Special Report.‖ The Economist. 12 February 2009. An excellent
overview of the Brazilian political economy written from the magazine’s normal promarket perspective.
Rohter, Larry. Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010. By far the best recent book on Brazil by a veteran journalist who has
spent years living and working there.
Skidmore, Thomas. Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, 2nd. ed. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010. The most popular textbook on Brazilian history in the North American
market.
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